PIPages
Labs

Ravi Parikh

Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research

People with cancer benefit from early, honest conversations about their prognosis, values and wishes for future care, called goals of care conversations. These talks can reduce unwanted hospital stays and ease anxiety and depression.

Fields

Medicine & Clinical Research

Public Health & Epidemiology

Topics

goals of care

advance care planning

serious illness communication

Grants
1 known grant, through Feb 2030

What they work on

  1. Test in a randomized trial whether A-PACT, machine learning risk prediction paired with lay health worker phone outreach, reduces hospitalizations and intensive end-of-life care for patients with cancer.
  2. Test whether A-PACT improves patient-reported anxiety, depression, communication and documented care preferences across community oncology practices.
  3. Use mixed methods guided by implementation science frameworks to identify patient, caregiver, clinician and organizational factors that shape A-PACT's effectiveness and adoption.

More about the research

Even so, they often do not happen. Busy oncologists must spot who needs one and start it during a clinic visit, and this is a major barrier. This project tests a scalable way to fill that gap in community cancer clinics, where most patients get their care.

Why it matters

Patients with cancer, especially near the end of life, often receive hospital care they would not have chosen and miss chances to state their wishes. A scalable program pairing automatic risk prediction with lay health worker outreach could bring earlier goals of care conversations to community oncology practices nationwide. This could reduce unwanted hospitalizations and improve patients' mood and communication about care preferences.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Algorithm-enabled Patients Activated in Cancer care through Teams (A-PACT) toimprove goals of care communication for people with cancer

NIH · Mar 2025 – Feb 2030

Closest labs

Katherine Courtright

University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research

Test whether an automated needs-based palliative care trigger in the electronic health record increases hospital-free days and palliative consults compared with usual care, in a cluster-randomized trial of over 64,000 patients at 9 hospitals.

Fahad Saeed

University of Rochester, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research

Determine whether the CKD-EDU palliative care intervention, a decision aid plus palliative clinician coaching, reduces decisional conflict at one month in patients aged 75 or older with advanced CKD.

Jennifer Steel

University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research

Evaluate whether CARES, an electronic health record-based screening and stepped collaborative care intervention, improves patient-centered outcomes such as health-related quality of life, in a cluster randomized trial of more than 34 outpatient oncology clinics.

The school

Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.

More about Emory University

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