Posts by Jeffrey L. Greenwald, MD
-
Social Worker–led Serious Illness Conversations Feasible in the ED
Emily L. Aaronson, MD, MPH, Jeffrey L. Greenwald, MD, and colleagues conducted a randomized pilot trial in which emergency department social workers had serious illness conversations with 66% of older adults with potential palliative care needs—on top of their usual duties—and 77% of patients appreciated the talk.
-
Peer Support for Clinicians Having Serious Illness Conversations During COVID-19
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of volunteer clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital gave rapid, confidential assistance to peers working to clarify values and goals of care with patients.
-
Systems Approach to Alerting Hospitalists of Need for Serious Illness Conversations Falls Short
A system for identifying patients who had potential unmet palliative care needs had limited impact on hospital medicine clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Biography
Jeff Greenwald, MD, is a native of Chicago and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. Thereafter, he attended Harvard Medical School and then completed Internal Medicine residency at Barnes Hospital. He then moved to Oxford, England, where he practiced as a specialist registrar at the John Radcliffe Hospital, spending time in both inpatient medicine and the ICU. After almost a year, Dr. Greenwald returned to the US and became the first hospitalist at Boston Medical Center. There he stayed for a decade, becoming the first director of the Hospital Medicine Unit. His work heavily focused on medical education and quality improvement, working on projects to improve influenza vaccination, medication reconciliation, ACS care, pain management and VTE prophylaxis. His work in HIV testing there resulted in being requested to advise the CDC on their inpatient HIV testing guidelines. He also helped to develop and implement Project RED and Project BOOST, both looking at how to improve the safety of patients being discharged from the hospital. He also ran an AHRQ funded conference on medication reconciliation, advised UHC, and contributed to the NQF metric on all cause readmissions, subsequently adopted by CMS.
In 2009, Dr. Greenwald moved to Mass General to join the Inpatient Clinician Educator Service as a teaching hospitalist and Core Educator Faculty of the Department of Medicine. He is an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and served as the lead physician for Mass General Brigham's High Performance Medicine Team on Readmissions. He continues to work with the Mass General Readmissions Care Redesign Committee and was a principal developer of the novel readmission risk indicator Mass General now uses. Dr Greenwald is also working closely with the Division of Palliative Care on the Palliative Care Continuum Project in an effort to expand primary palliative care skills and education to clinicians across the care spectrum at Mass General.
Geriatrics & Palliative Care
The Division of Palliative Care & Geriatric Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital offers a wide range of clinical expertise including inpatient services, outpatient programs and home based programs.