AGEM Author Spotlight July 2025

Published Work by AGEM Members

 

AGEM Author Spotlight: Corita Grudzen, MD, MSHS, Emergency Medicine Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Palliative Care Initiated in the Emergency Department: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial

Dr. Grudzen's research centers on understanding and improving the care given to those older adults with serious illness, with a focus on integrating palliative care and emergency medicine and matching patients to treatments that most closely align with their preferences.   She completed two large pragmatic trials in 2024 with over $20 million in funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the National Institute of Health that focus on improving emergency medicine palliative care access (EMPallA) and scaling primary palliative care for emergency medicine (PRIM-ER).  In 2023, she received a $56 million award from the NIA to conduct a pragmatic trial of a concurrently run emergency care redesign, nurse-led telephonic care, and community paramedic-led transitions intervention in persons living with dementia using a factorial design across 80 EDs to test the effectiveness of the interventions on ED revisits, hospitalizations, and healthy days at home following an index ED visit.  She serves as an MPI for the overall project and PI of the Implementation Core at MSK.

Corita Grudzen, MD, MSHS joined MSK in 2022 as the founding incumbent of the Fern Grayer Chair in Oncology Care and Patient Experience dedicated to prioritizing cancer care innovation, attentiveness to care delivery, and the patient experience.  She serves as Head of the newly created Division of Supportive and Acute Care Services (SAS) in the Department of Medicine and Director of the Center for Cancer Care Innovation. SAS unites four services –Emergency Care, Hospital Medicine, Rapid Diagnosis, Early Detection, and Risk Reduction (RaDaR), and Supportive Care– that are focused on the evaluation and management of acutely ill patients and the non-oncologic medical management before, during, and after a diagnosis of cancer.