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Death By Design

Dr. Rebecca Sudore, Prepare For Your Care

Season 2, Ep. 15

Rebecca Sudore, MD, FAAHPM, Professor of Medicine, Geriatrics Division, University of California, San Francisco.


Dr. Sudore is a geriatrician, palliative medicine physician, and advance care planning researcher. She also directs the Innovation & Implementation Center in Aging & Palliative Care (I-CAP) and the Vulnerable Populations for Aging Research Core of the NIA-funded Pepper Center.


Dr. Sudore is passionate about making medical information easier to understand and helping people make informed medical decisions.


Dr. Sudore has dedicated her research program to making medical information easier for patients and their families to understand. She published the first prospective study demonstrating the effect of limited literacy on mortality in the elderly, and has shown that elders with limited literacy have greater difficulty making medical decisions for informed consent and advance care planning. She has also designed and tested an informed consent process for patients with limited literacy and an advance directive that is both literacy and culturally appropriate. Both interventions have been shown to benefit patients - particularly those with literacy and/or language barriers. Even though her low-literate advance directive has been translated and widely disseminated, further research with patients and surrogate decision makers helped her realize that advance directives alone are not enough. In 2010, she published a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine calling for a shift in advance care planning from DNR/DNI checklists to preparing patients and their loved ones for medical decision making. Her current research program is focused on designing and testing interactive, web-based interventions to prepare patients and their surrogate decision makers to make difficult medical decisions.



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