Rebecca Sudore, MD

OVERVIEW: Dr. Rebecca Sudore is a geriatrician, palliative medicine physician, and clinician investigator. She also directs the Innovation and Implementation Center in Aging & Palliative Care (I-CAP) and the Vulnerable Populations Aging Research Core of the NIA-funded Pepper Center. Dr. Sudore conducts research to improve advance care planning (ACP) and medical decision making for culturally and ethnically diverse older adults. To this end, she has designed, tested and disseminated innovative, patient centered tools including an easy-to-read advance directive for all US states in several languages and an interactive, ACP website called PREPARE for Your Care (www.PREPAREforYourCare.org) in English and Spanish. Dr. Sudore has dedicated her research program to making medical information easier for patients and their families to understand. She published the first prospective study demonstrating the effect of limited literacy on mortality in the elderly, and has shown that older adults with limited literacy have greater difficulty making medical decisions for informed consent and advance care planning. She has also designed and tested an informed consent process for patients with limited literacy and an advance directive that is both literacy and culturally appropriate. Both interventions have been shown to benefit patients - particularly those with literacy and/or language barriers. Although the easy-to-read advance directives have been translated and widely disseminated, her further research demonstrated that advance directives alone are not enough -- patients and families need better preparation for communication and decision making. She published a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine calling for a shift in advance care planning from DNR/DNI checklists to preparing patients and their loved ones for medical decision making. Her current research program is focused on designing and testing interactive, web-based interventions (PREPAREforYourCare.org) to prepare patients and their surrogate decision makers to communicate their wishes and make informed medical decisions. CLINICAL ACTIVITIES: From 2002 to 2023 Rebecca provided primary care to vulnerable, older Veterans in the Geriatrics clinic at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. At that time, and now, she also attends on the inpatient Palliative Care Service at the San Francisco VA.