Innovations in End-of-Life Care
an international journal of leaders in end-of-life care

Dr. Joan Teno is an Associate Professor of Community Health and Associate Director of the Centerfor Gerontology and Health Care Research at the Brown Medical School. She is a health services researcher, hospice medical director, and board-certified internist with added qualification in Geriatrics.

Dr. Teno's focus has been on measuring and evaluating interventions to improve the quality of medical care for seriously ill and dying patients. Dr. Teno led the effort in the design of the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORT) intervention analysis and was lead author in twelve publications from that research effort, which ranged from the role of advance directives to describing the dying experience of seriously ill and older adults. Both as a researcher and clinician, Dr. Teno has devoted her career to understanding the preferences of patients with life-defining illness and ways to assess patients' quality of life.

Dr. Teno is the lead investigator in a research effort to create a Toolkit of Instruments to Measure Care at the End of Life (TIME). In this grant funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dr. Teno led a team of investigators that conducted literature reviews to catalogue existing instruments and develop new measures to examine the quality of care at the end of life. She continues this initiative with a current research project titled Data Analysis and Reports for Toolkit Instruments (DART). Growing out of the TIME project, DART shortens the Toolkit instruments and makes them more "user-friendly" by creating a computerized system that analyzes the data and returns a report to the health care facility. Other current projects include a five-year research effort to use both existing and new data collections to describe the dying experience in the United States of America utilizing maps which display geographical data about quality of end-of-life care.