Grand Rounds: Electronic Nudges and Pragmatic Trials to Improve Hospital Palliative Care Delivery

Join us for IMPACT Grand Rounds with Katherine Courtright.

Katherine (Kate) Courtright, MD, MSHP, is an assistant professor of medicine and a core faculty member at the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Courtright’s research aims to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of palliative care delivery for people living with serious illnesses. Her research combines insights from the fields of predictive, behavioral, and implementation sciences to develop and test novel interventions in large, embedded, pragmatic trials that systematically promote timely primary and specialist palliative care for patients most likely to benefit. By leveraging hybrid pragmatic trial designs, Courtright’s work further elucidates key implementation contextual factors at multiple levels within a health care system to facilitate interpretation and dissemination of trial findings. She graduated from Temple University School of Medicine, completed her internal medicine residency and a chief residency at the University of Pennsylvania. She remained at University of Pennsylvania for fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care hospice and palliative medicine, and earned a master’s degree in health policy research. Courtright joined the Penn Medicine faculty in 2016, attends in the medical ICU and on the inpatient palliative care consult team, and serves as the director of research for Penn Medicine Palliative Care.