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...

Today we interviewed Bob Wachter about his book, "A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future."  You may recall we interviewed Bob in April 2024 about AI, 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:

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 SCOPE and PERIOP-PC tr...

"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. Af...

The only certainty in medicine is uncertainty. It touches every aspect of clinical practice, from diagnosis to treatment to prognosis. Despite this, many clinicians view uncertainty as something to tolerate at best or eliminate at worst. But what if we need to rethink and reframe our relationship with uncertainty in medicine?

In this episode, we sit down with Jonathan Ilgen and Gurpreet Dhaliwal, co-author...

In a recent episode of the GeriPal podcast, we explored whether the field of palliative care is in need of saving—and, if so, how to save it—with guests Ira Byock, Kristi Newport, and Brynn Bowman. Today, we shift focus to one actionable way to improve palliative care: through quality improvement (QI) collaboratives, registries, and benchmarking. 

To guide this discussion, we've invited three leading expe...

Have you had one of those consults in which you're thinking, huh, sounds like the patient's goals are clear, it's really that the clinician consulting us disagrees with those goals?  To what extent is it our job as consultants to navigate, manage, or attend to clinician distress?  What happens when that clinician distress leads eventually to conflict between the consulting clinician and the palliative care team?

In this week's podcast, we sit down with Drs. Sarguni Singh, Christian Furman, and Lynn Flint, three authors of the recent Journal of the American Geriatrics Society article, "Rehab and Death: Improving End-of-Life Care for Medicare Skilled Nursing Facility Beneficiaries." 

The authors dive into the challenges facing seriously ill older adults discharged to Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs), where fragmen...

Six years ago we had John Newman on GeriPal to talk about Geroscience (Song choice Who Wants to Live Forever by Queen, perfect selection).  John explained the basics of geroscience, what is it, what are the key theories in geroscience, what is senescence, why people who provide clinical care for older adults should care about geroscience, and potential therapeutics like metformin and rapamycin.

Today we br...

In this week's episode, we delve into the powerful documentary The Chaplain and The Doctor with two extraordinary guests: Betty Clark, the chaplain at the heart of the film, and Dr. Jessica Zitter, the physician and filmmaker who brought this story to the screen. 

The film provides a deeply moving look into the ways personal stories and biases shape our interactions in healthcare. Through our conversation ...

In June of 2025, hospice and palliative care pioneer Ira Byock published a white paper outlining the urgent challenges facing the field today. In a nutshell, he expressed concerns that the quality of hospice care in the United States has become highly variable, with disturbing frequency of unethical practices and avaricious owners. He also raised concern that the rapid increase in palliative care program growth during ...

Today's topic on palliative care for sickle cell disease may raise eyebrows with some of you.  You might think, wait, now we're doing sickle cell?  On top of liquid cancer and transplant, kidney disease, liver disease, and survivorship?  Where does it end?  Do we have staff for all of this?

Well I implore you, dear listeners, to keep an open mind and listen to this podcast.  Our guests do a fabulous jo...

Last month, the "Billing Boys"—Chris Jones and Phil Rodgers—joined the GeriPal podcast to demystify medical billing and coding in palliative care. This month, we're back with part two, shifting the focus to geriatrics. While billing and coding may not be the most exciting topic, they're essential for ensuring fair reimbursement for the complex care we provide and for supporting the work of our interprofessional teams,...

I'm going to begin with a wonderful quote from a recent editorial in Bioethics by our guests Parker Crutchfield & Jason Wasserman. This quote illustrates the tension between the widely held view in bioethics that slow codes are unethical, and the complexity of real world hospital practice: "Decisive moral positions are easy to come by when sitting in the cheap seats of academic journals, but a troubling ambivalence is ...

This 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 C...

Eric and I had the pleasure of doing a GeriPal Live! Podcast as the closing keynote for the recent Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) National Assembly in Philadelphia PA.

For this podcast, we invited 3 guests to each select an article of interest to them, and engage in a discussion about the article, including questions from the CAPC attendees in the audience.

Our guests chose the follo...

We love getting requests from listeners for podcast topics.  This request came from geriatricians we met at the annual American Geriatrics Society meeting in Chicago.  They wanted to know more about what a geriatrician should do in a pre-operative risk assessment.  So we invited Vicky Tang and Houman Javedan, two geriatricians and leaders in the pre-operative assessment and prehab space, to talk with us.

What is a "good death"? How should we define it, and who gets to decide? Is the concept of a "good death" even useful?

Twenty-five years ago, Karen Steinhauser published a groundbreaking study in JAMA that transformed my understanding of what it means to have a good death and questioned the usefulness of the term itself. This study examined the factors that are important at the end of life for patients, fa...

A podcast on medical billing and coding??? Ok, hear us out as we were skeptical too. We've invited the Billing Boys, Chris Jones and Phil Rodgers, who convinced us of the following:

1. Billing is complicated, but it isn't hard. 

2. Effectively billing helps pay for the interprofessional team mem...