Ari Friedman, MD, PhD

As a health economist and emergency physician, I conduct research as well care for patients in a metropolitan Level I Trauma Center. My Ph.D. trained me to use statistical models to understand how care and outcomes change as a result of natural experiments and to understand how market forces drive emergency department (ED) crowding and access to alternative sites of unscheduled care like urgent care clinics.

I am now tenure-track faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute. I work with geriatricians and geriatric neurologists regularly, have taken the PRIM-ER palliative emergency medicine short course, and collaborate with the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research Center on goals of care alignment for older adults in acute care settings. My NIA K23 project uses a novel cohort as well as electronic health record data to study the management, diagnoses, and outcomes of abdominal pain in older patients in EDs.

In turn, these early research efforts have led to a greater clinical understanding, which has driven my research agenda. I observed how the ED is a deliriogenic environment for patients with baseline vulnerabilities such as cognitive impairment and dementia, and am building tools to better identify patients at risk of delirium and pathways to improve and prioritize their care.