Advance Care Planning
Research in advance care planning and end-of-life decision-making
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Improving end-of-life decision-making with a multidisciplinary approach
Penn State College of Medicine is home to a multidisciplinary group of researchers and clinicians working in the areas of advance care planning and surrogate decision-making. The research team is co-led by Drs. Benjamin Levi and Michael Green, physicians and bioethicists who have collaborated for more than 25 years. The team is broad and eclectic, including primary care and subspecialist physicians, nurses, lawyers and people with expertise in public health, policy, philosophy and mixed-methods research.
Help for surrogate decision-makers
After showing that the online tool was helpful for patients, the group began to study whether it could also help their family members to be better prepared for their role as surrogate decision-makers. Using mixed methods, the group is conducting a clinical trial to determine whether use of the online tool is more effective than standard advance directives at helping family caregivers be prepared to make surrogate decisions for their loved ones with advanced life-threatening conditions.
The team is also conducting an analysis of how family caregivers understand and experience surrogate decision-making for loved ones who have advanced life-threatening conditions. Using mixed methods, this project analyzes quantitative data (about family caregivers’ anxiety, stress, personality type and communication preferences) and qualitative interview data (about their experience with surrogate decision-making) to develop a more complete picture of the decision-making process.
Learn more about these studies
Multiple goals communication
Because successful communication is so central to effective advance care planning, the group has created a novel methodology for assessing the quality of communication related to end-of-life issues. The methodology is grounded in the multiple goals theory of communication and offers a more nuanced, contextual and theoretical measure of communication quality than traditional assessments.
