Follow along with this series on the Cambia Health Foundation’s blog and learn how these 12 emerging palliative care leaders, from across the interdisciplinary team, are working to advance palliative care and transform the experience of people and families facing serious illness..

Sojourns Scholar: Dr. Charlotta Lindvall

• Palliative Care Physician, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Instructor, Harvard Medical School
• Project: Deep Learning in Palliative care (DeepLeaP) Collaborative

Communication that clarifies a patient’s care preferences is widely recognized as a quality indicator, especially for frail and seriously ill patients. However, routine assessment of these conversations is nearly impossible because the only documentation of the information may be the clinical note written by the clinician. Seriously ill patients often accrue hundreds of clinical visit notes. 

With a long-term goal to promote patient-centered care, Dr. Charlotta Lindvall is working to combine the power of the latest computer science capabilities including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with clinical palliative care to improve the lives of people living with serious illness. 

As a 2018 Sojourns Scholar, Dr. Lindvall plans to implement some of her latest methods for capturing a patient’s goals of care or limitations on life sustaining treatments across multiple hospitals, analyze how they are received and then report out the findings.  In the future, Dr. Lindvall hopes to scale these methods to work with data across multiple electronic health record systems.

“The Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program is a unique opportunity that affords me the time and resources to pursue this essential component of quality palliative care,” said Charlotta Lindvall MD.

To learn more about Dr. Lindvall and her project with the Sojourns Scholars Leadership Program, watch this video.