Our Mission
Our Center understands the most pressing issues confronting people with serious illness.
The Center motto, “Putting Research into Action” guides our mission to generate knowledge, techniques, and tools to improve medical care as well as address and ease the challenges that family and close others face when a loved one is seriously ill.
Our Research
The Center works in conjunction with diverse sets of medical and academic institutions around the world to conduct primary research in the field of end-of-life medical communication, decision-making, quality of life, and quality of care.
Our Goals
Our work seeks to:
- Address ways to improve terminally ill patients’ and family caregivers’ prognostic understanding and knowledge of the intent, as well as expected and possible outcomes of treatments
- Reduce racial and ethnic disparities in end-of-life care
- Examine patient and family values, treatment preferences, physical and emotional and spiritual needs and suffering in order to promote whole patient care
- Promote advance care planning to ensure patients receive care consistent with their informed preferences and aligned with their values
- Promote shared, patient-centered medical decision-making near death
- Conduct comparative effectiveness analyses of palliative treatments (including palliative chemotherapy and radiation, immune-therapies)
- Reduce anxiety, depression, spiritual and existential suffering, stress, trauma and grief in patients and caregivers
- Conduct cost-effectiveness analyses to determine not just the costs, but the quality of life of any “extra time” bought by medical interventions