GeriPal Live! at NPCRC Foley Retreat: Dio Kavalieratos, Prasanna Ananth, Alexi Wright
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Release Date: 10/16/2025
CMS's Age-Friendly Hospital Measure: Julia Adler-Milstein, Stephanie Rogers, and Shari Ling
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
In 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began requiring hospitals participating in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program to report on a new “Age-Friendly Hospital Measure.” The hope is that, by attesting to this measure, hospitals will develop evidence-based processes to improve care for older adults in hospital settings. On this week's podcast, we explore this new measure with Sheri Ling, CMS’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer serving in the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ). We’ve also invited some returning guests from our past...
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De-intensify Anti-Hypertensives for Nursing Home Residents? Athanase Benetos and Mike Steinman
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
A few weeks ago, I was skimming this paper for UCSF’s Division of Geriatrics Journal club on de-prescribing anti-hypertensive medications for older adults in nursing homes. Seemed to make a world of sense. The found no difference between the deprescribing arm and the usual care arm in mortality, the primary study outcome. I thought, great! So we can deprescribe anti-hypertensives without changing mortality, that must be what the authors concluded. I was shocked, therefore, to read in the first paragraph of the discussion that the deprescribing arm did not achieve the hypothesized 25%...
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Alzheimer's Definitions, Biomarkers, and Antibodies: Halima Amjad, Barak Gaster, and Heather Whitson
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
It’s an era of breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research, yet for many clinicians, it’s also a time of profound uncertainty. We are currently navigating competing definitions of the disease, multiple new biomarkers coming on market seemingly every week, and the clinical rollout of new amyloid antibodies. How do we translate this rapid-fire science into daily practice? On this week’s GeriPal podcast, we sit down with dementia experts , , and . We dive deep into: The evolving definitions of Alzheimer’s disease. Does someone have Alzheimer's disease if you have only an abnormal...
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Leadership, Quality, and the Future of Hospice: Guests Chris Comeaux and Cordt Kassner
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Today we’re doing something different. Today, dear listeners, you get two podcasts for the price of one! (OK, our podcasts are both free, but you get the idea). We’re joined today by Chris Comeaux, host of , a podcast about leadership, strategy, innovation, and the future of serious illness care, and author of . We are also joined by TCN Talks’ frequent guest host Cordt Kassner, CEO of , which provides in depth data on hospice quality, utilization, and access, and publisher of , a daily email about the hottest stories and news in the field. This is an “ask us anything” style podcast...
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Deprescribing at the End of Life: Jennifer Tjia, Jon Furuno, Simon Mooijaart
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Philippe Pinel that “It is an art of no little importance to administer medicines properly, but it is an art of much greater and more difficult acquisition to know when to suspend or altogether to omit them.” This insight remains profoundly relevant today, especially in hospice care, where inappropriate prescribing is a common issue. Studies show that 20%–70% of hospice patients receive at least one unnecessary medication near the end of life, including drugs like antihypertensives, statins, and vitamins. In this episode of the GeriPal Podcast, we tackle the pressing topic of...
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Unilateral DNR? Gina Piscitello, Erin DeMartino, Will Parker
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Do you think your hospital should allow unilateral DNR orders? Under what circumstances? Through what process? Do you think that when you obtain the assent of a family to not code their loved one, that assent DNR should be counted as a unilateral DNR order? Should we document unilateral DNR and the rationale? Why for DNR, when we don’t document unilateral dialysis not offered, or unilateral no ECMO offered? Is the assent of a family member to a statement that we will not code their loved one a nudge, and is the assent approach ? Reasonable people will disagree, as we do on this...
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Embedding Care in the ED: Liz Goldberg and Lauren Southerland
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
The idea of embedding various forms of non-emergency care in the emergency department makes a WORLD of sense. If an older adult comes into the ED with a fall, the minimum the ED has to do is address the fall injury and send them out. But many emergency providers realize this is often a band aid. They see that patient again the next time they fall. And again. And again. The same could be said for the patient who is malnourished and dehydrated and admitted for “failure to thrive,” again. And again. Our two guests today, Liz Goldberg and Lauren Southerland, both...
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AI and Healthcare: Bob Wachter
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Today we interviewed Bob Wachter about his book, “.” You may recall we , and at that time he was on the fence about AI - more promise or more peril for healthcare? As his book’s title suggests, he’s come down firmly on the promise side of the equation. On our podcast we discuss: Why Bob wrote this book, at this time, and concerns about writing a static book about AI and Healthcare, a field that is dynamic and shifting rapidly. He’s right though - we’ve not had a “ChatGPT”-launch type moment recently. Top 5 or so ways in which Bob uses AI for work,...
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The Role of Specialty Palliative Care in Cancer Surgery: Rebecca Aslakson & Myrick Shinall
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
Recent randomized controlled trials have shown that routine perioperative palliative care does not improve outcomes for patients undergoing curative-intent cancer surgery. No, that wasn’t a typo. Regardless of how the data were analyzed, the findings remained consistent: perioperative palliative care DID NOT improve outcomes in the only two randomized controlled trials conducted in this area—the and trials. Null trials like these often receive less attention in academic and clinical settings, but they can be profoundly practice-changing. Consider the . While some have argued it...
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The Future of Palliative Care? Community-Based Models with Alan Chiu, Mindy Stewart-Coffee, and Ben Thompson
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
“I just want to say one word to you. One word. Plastics… There's a great future in plastics.” This iconic line from the movie The Graduate is at the top of my mind when I think about where we are heading in healthcare. I’ve interpreted “plastics” as symbolizing a dystopian, mass-produced future of medicine—where artificiality and inauthenticity dominate in the pursuit of efficiency and profit margins. After listening to today’s podcast on the growth of community-based palliative care, I find my perspective shifting on this quote. Perhaps the advice given for a...
info_outlineThis is the second GeriPal podcast we’ve recorded live using this format, see this link to our prior podcast at the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) meeting in Philadelphia. Also look for our upcoming podcast recorded live from the São Paulo Geriatrics & Gerontology Congress, click here to register.
Today we join you from beautiful Banff, Alberta, Canada at the National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC) annual Kathleen Foley retreat. This meeting was bittersweet. I’ve been fortunate to attend every meeting in one capacity or another since 2006. The NPCRC made an enormous impact on the growth and capacity for palliative care research nationally. Personally, NPCRC funding was essential support as I was a new faculty member and had not yet secured longer term career development funding.
More than anything, though, I will miss the NPCRC community. I treasure those meals, hikes, sing-alongs with others dedicated to improving care of people with serious illness through research.
On today’s podcast, we invited Dio Kavalieratos, Prasanna Ananth, and Alexi Wright to join us to talk about three articles that spoke to them. For each I leave you with a teaser of a hard question that was raised that we couldn’t really answer.
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Prasanna chose an article by Abby Rosenberg about being fired in palliative care. We talked about why palliative care clinicians get fired, with Prasanna, a pediatric oncologist, raising the issue that it’s more problematic when you’re the oncologist providing primary palliative care and you get fired than if the consultant specialty palliative care provider is fired.
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Dio chose an article about the economic benefits of palliative care internationally, a call to action. We talked about the needs of palliative care internationally, and Alexi raised the question: should the highest standard of palliative care (e.g. in the US) apply to palliative care in every country, a la the Partners in Health model pioneered by the late Paul Farmer? Or should we “settle” for access to affordable opioids?
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Alexi chose an article about cancer care in prison. Alexi used it as a springboard to talk about other populations at compounded risk for poorer care in the current political environment.
We hope you enjoy this one as much as we did, dear listeners. We’re always trying to improve, and welcome your suggestions for how to improve upon this new “live” format. So far we’ve heard we need to be better at summarizing the articles for the audience/listeners, and finding ways to involve our live audience to a greater extent than the occasional question. Please let us know if you have other suggestions!
Final note - check out the wonderful video NPCRC created about their impact on the field of palliative care (Eric and I were filmed recording GeriPal).
-Alex Smith
This episode of the GeriPal Podcast is sponsored by UCSF’s Division of Palliative Medicine, an amazing group doing world class palliative care. They are looking for physician faculty to join them in the inpatient and outpatient setting. To learn more about job opportunities, please click here: https://aprecruit.ucsf.edu/apply/JPF05811