Joshua Lakin

Joshua Lakin

Discipline: Physician
Funding awarded to: Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center

Bringing Interdisciplinary Work to Primary Palliative Care Communication Interventions

The goal is to leverage prior experience working with front line clinicians to create an advanced training program and implementation guide that uses an interdisciplinary model to identify patients and to trigger, initiate, and document conversations. Through this project we will create an advisory board, engage motivated local champions, facilitate patient input, and obtain frontline clinician feedback during a rigorous, iterative implementation process. Our evaluation will assess the 1) implementation of the intervention; 2) extent of interdisciplinary coordination; 3) qualities of goals and wishes conversations; 4) effect on clinician satisfaction; and 5) use of system resources. This project will generate knowledge in developing scalable and sustainable interdisciplinary models needed for primary palliative care communication projects.

“My experience in finance, consulting, and business, coupled now with a growing mentoring network of key leaders in the palliative care field, give me a solid foundation from which to leverage the Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program. Additionally, there is rapidly growing high-level support of interdisciplinary work to implement primary palliative care programs here at my home institutions of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard, and Partners Healthcare. The Sojourns Scholar program offers me the additional space to use these opportunities to take the next steps towards becoming a regional and national leader. I believe that, during times of immense growth and expansion such as what we are experiencing currently in palliative care, careful and critical analysis of interventions is core to implementation and scaling of them in an impactful and sustainable way. Now is the right time for me to learn more about how to excel at this work, through mentored program work and targeted personal development, and there is no better opportunity for me than this program.”