Sangeeta Ahluwalia PhD, MPH, BA, MA

Sangeeta C. Ahluwalia, PhD, MPH is a Research Health Scientist at the Center for the Study of Healthcare Provider Behavior, Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. She received her PhD in Health Services and Policy Analysis from UC Berkeley and completed an NIA traineeship in Geriatric Clinical Epidemiology at Yale University. Dr. Ahluwalia's research goal is to improve patient-provider communication about end-of-life care. She is currently conducting research to understand and improve advanced care planning communication processes between heart failure patients and their primary care providers.

Dr. Ahluwalia will use implementation science methods to develop and pilot-test a clinical informatics intervention to systematize the conduct of ICU family conferences. She will first conduct focus groups with critical care and palliative care clinicians to identify barriers and facilitators to conducting a family conference and characterize provider needs and preferences for an informatics intervention. She will then convene a national expert panel to rate the validity and feasibility of specific processes of care and elements of communication for inclusion in an intervention. Based on findings from the focus groups and expert panel, Dr. Ahluwalia will pilot-test a prototype intervention at two VA sites and conduct a formative evaluation to inform wider-scale implementation efforts.