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Rebecca L. Sudore, M.D. (VA)
Associate Professor of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine
rsucsf@yahoo.com
2009-2012 Cohort
Project Title:  “Enhancing Advance Care Planning in Diverse Elders with Limited Literacy”

About the Project:
This project focused on creating culturally and literacy appropriate tools to help patients define the value they place on the burden and outcomes of treatment.

Biosketch:
Rebecca L. Sudore, M.D. is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She received her B.S. from the University of Washington and her M.D. from UCSF. She also completed an Internal Medicine residency and a Geriatrics and Research Fellowship at UCSF and obtained an added certification in Hospice and Palliative Medicine. She currently has an active geriatrics clinic and attends on the Palliative Care Consult Service.
Dr. Sudore’s research focuses on the intersection of limited health literacy, geriatrics, end-of-life care, and medical decision making. She published one of the first prospective studies demonstrating the effect of limited literacy on mortality in the elderly, and has shown that elders with limited literacy have greater difficulty making medical decisions for informed consent and advance care planning. She has designed and tested interventions to improve patient decision making by creating an informed consent process for patients with limited literacy and an advance directive that is both literacy and culturally appropriate. Both interventions have been shown to benefit patients – particularly those with literacy and/or language barriers.

Her Physician Faculty Scholars Program project was titled “Enhancing Advance Care Planning in Diverse Elders with Limited Literacy.”   The goal of this work is to better enable patients to engage in the advance care planning process and to make appropriate medical decisions at the end-of-life.

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