Dr. Courtright Discusses A Pragmatic Trial of Electronic Nudges on the GeriPal Podcast

From GeriPal:

One marker of the distance we’ve traveled in palliative care is the blossoming evidence base for the field. Ten years ago we would have been hard pressed to find 3 clinical trial abstracts submitted to the annual meeting, much less high quality randomized trials with robust measures, sample sizes, and analytics plans. Well, as a kick off to this year’s first in-person State of the Science plenary, held in conjunction with the closing Saturday session of the AAHPM/HPNA Annual Assembly, 3 randomized clinical trials were presented.

Today we interview the authors of these 3 abstracts about their findings:

Tom LeBlanc about a multisite trial of palliative care for patients undergoing Stem Cell Transplant for blood cancers (outcomes = quality of life, depression, anxiety)

Kate Courtright about a pragmatic trial of electronic nudges to prognosticate and/or offer comfort-focused treatment to mechanically ventilated ICU patients/surrogates (outcomes = lengths of stay, hospice, time to discontinuation of life-support)

Corita Grudzen on a pragmatic trial of two palliative care approaches for patients with advanced cancer or organ failure discharged from the ED: a nurse-led telephone intervention or outpatient specialty palliative care clinic (outcomes = quality of life, symptom burden, loneliness, healthcare utilization)