# Identifying palliative care needs among hospitalized patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

> **NIH NIH K23** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2021 · $161,249

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Millions of Americans with COPD experience burdensome symptoms, reduced quality of life, and undesirable
end-of-life care. Increasing palliative care for this vulnerable population is widely advocated to improve these
important patient-centered outcomes. Yet patients with COPD rarely receive palliative care due, in part, to
difficulties identifying which patients have unmet palliative care needs and palliative care workforce shortages.
The proposed study's core objective is to address the national priority of improving palliative care for patients
with COPD by developing an efficient, innovative, and patient-centered method to identify those with unmet
palliative care needs. Specifically, the candidate seeks to (1) assess patients with COPD to determine their
palliative care needs; (2) develop and validate an electronic health record-based classification model for each
domain of palliative care needs; and (3) evaluate the relationship between the probability of having unmet
palliative care needs and patient-centered clinical outcomes. The study will involve an in-person cross-
sectional survey of 432 hospitalized patients with COPD of any stage. Participants will complete a validated
survey to capture a wide variety of palliative care needs, which will be supplemented with expert chart review
to identify patients with needs in any of three clinically relevant and actionable domains. These cases will be
used as the patient-reported reference standard for development and validation of domain-specific
classification models leveraging natural language processing of unstructured clinical text in electronic health
records and machine learning methods. Finally, a large, multicenter retrospective cohort study will evaluate the
associations between different probabilities of having unmet palliative care needs and several clinical
outcomes important to patients, caregivers, and hospitals. This will enable the identification of thresholds of
probabilities of unmet needs above which COPD patients' risks of undesirable clinical outcomes increase.
Such patients will then be targeted for enrollment in future trials testing interventions to improve these
outcomes. Completion of this research will build upon the candidate's past training, which includes a Masters
in Health Policy Research obtained with NHLBI T32 support, an F32-supported post-doctoral fellowship, and a
career development award from the National Palliative Care Research Center, and will provide the experience,
education, and mentorship to allow the candidate to become a fully independent investigator. The candidate's
rigorous training plan, focused on obtaining advanced skills in multisite prospective research, patient-centered
outcomes research, and advanced bioinformatics methods will allow her to submit successful R01 or PCORI
applications testing interventions directly informed by the results of this work. The candidate's primary mentor,
collaborators, and advisors will ensure ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10237990
- **Project number:** 5K23HL143181-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Katherine Rinaldi Courtright
- **Activity code:** K23 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $161,249
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-15 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10237990

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10237990, Identifying palliative care needs among hospitalized patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (5K23HL143181-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10237990. Licensed CC0.

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