SPONSORED RESEARCH: Transforming End-of-Life Care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital

October 1, 2026

Read a Q&A Below:

What are the aims of the project?

Despite strong evidence supporting early, patient-centered end-of-life (EOL) care, delivery remains inconsistent, often occurring during acute crises. Barriers can occur at multiple levels, including challenges related to clinical workflows, care transitions, communication, available tools and resources, and reimbursement policies. Using implementation science approaches, the Ideas to Implementation (I2I) team led by Rinad Beidas, PhD is working with clinical and health system partners and executive sponsors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Diane Wayne, MD; Eytan Szmuilowicz, MD) to better understand these challenges and identify opportunities to improve EOL care across inpatient and primary care settings. This work is funded by the Dixon Translational Research Grants Initiative.

In this project, we will assess EOL care practice, including how EOL conversations are initiated, documented, and translated into care, with the goal of identifying implementation barriers and facilitators that influence the uptake of effective EOL care approaches in real-world clinical settings. We will engage key constituents, including patients, caregivers, primary care clinicians, hospital-based teams, social workers, and palliative care team members, and conduct a systematic review of the literature to develop a roadmap for targeted, scalable intervention.

What are your next steps?

We will be conducting targeted interviews to explore challenges and opportunities related to EOL care and completing a focused review of the associated literature. We will use these findings to convene a working group, prioritize potential solutions, and develop an implementation logic model and roadmap for future intervention.

What do you hope will come out of this funded research?

Through this work, we hope to develop a practical, evidence-informed roadmap for improving how EOL care is delivered. The goal is to identify actionable and scalable strategies that make high-quality, patient-centered EOL care easier to deliver earlier and more consistently. This work will provide a foundation for future implementation efforts aimed at improving the quality, efficiency, and equity of EOL care.