New Penn Research Center Focused on Palliative Care for Dementia Patients

The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is establishing a new research center designed to improve palliative care for dementia patients who dwell in nursing homes or assisted living facilities. 

The new center, called the Transformative Residential Palliative Care for Persons with Dementia Center Through Behavioral Economics and Data Science, will be financed through a $2.5 million National Institute on Aging (NIA) grant to Penn’s Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center.

“The purpose of the center is to transform and substantially improve the efficiency of palliative care delivery for persons with dementia and their caregivers in residential settings, by which I mean primarily nursing homes and assisted living,” said Scott Halpern, director of PAIR and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn, who will lead the new center. “The ways in which we will seek to achieve that goal will include a series of studies in partnership with Genesis Healthcare. We will be providing core research infrastructure and financial resources to support studies that leverage methods from data science and behavioral economics to greatly improve upon the efficiency of palliative care delivery.”