FIELDS Trainee Awarded Funding to Study Decision Fatigue news

Mary McKenzie, MD, a 3rd-year fellow in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Penn, has been awarded two different grants to study the impact of decision fatigue on end-of-life decision making. An award from the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation will support an investigation of how decision fatigue influences’ critical care physicians’ decisions to engage families in meetings to discuss goals of care.  The second award, a pilot grant from the Penn-CMU Roybal P30 Center on Behavioral Economics and Health, supported by the National Institute on Aging, will foster an examination of how decision fatigue influences surrogate decision makers’ accuracy of predicting their loved ones’ preferences, and their propensities for choosing to withdraw life support for their loved ones in situations with low probability for meaningful recovery.