Corita R. Grudzen MD, MSHS, FACEP

Corita R. Grudzen is the Vice Chair for Research at NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, United States. She received a BS from Stanford University and her MD from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her residency and was a chief resident in Emergency Medicine at Bellevue Hospital Center/New York University. After residency, she spent three years at the University of California, Los Angeles as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, where she learned health services research methods to do community-based participatory research and worked as an attending physician at the Los Angeles County/the University of Southern California Emergency Department (ED) and in the Los Angeles City Jails. She earned an MS in Health Services and focused her research as a Clinical Scholar on public health and policy issues in vulnerable populations. Her work and collaboration with Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services resulted in a change in pre-hospital resuscitation policy that now allows paramedics to take family preferences and individual patient characteristics into account in deciding whether to initiate resuscitation. Dr. Grudzen received funding from the California Health Care Foundation to evaluate this policy change. In her last year as a Clinical Scholar, she was also part of a research team conducting a randomized controlled trial of palliative care in the ED at Los Angeles County Medical Center.

Because of her interest in bridging palliative and emergency medicine, Dr. Grudzen joined the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Geriatrics at Mount Sinai in 2008. As a Brookdale Fellow, Dr. Grudzen will develop a model for ED-based palliative care service delivery for older adults. Through interviews with patients and caregivers, focus groups with emergency physicians, and key informant interviews with hospital administration at an academic, municipal, and community hospital, she will develop a sustainable model to deliver palliative care to older adults in the ED that is targeted to patients’ needs, accepted by emergency providers, and easily integrated into current hospital structure.