We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers drawing from sociology, bioethics, and clinical medicine to improve serious illness care and hospital-based care.
Research Mission
​Understanding how broader social and structural forces influence our ability to provide patient-centered serious illness and hospital-based care and co-designing systems-level interventions to improve that care.​
About Us
Dr. Liz Dzeng leads a vibrant, interdisciplinary research group operating at the nexus of the social sciences, ethics, and clinical medicine. We are based at the Division of Hospital Medicine (DHM) at UCSF and affiliated with the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS) and the Division of Geriatrics. Our team’s research weaves together approaches from sociology, medical ethics, end-of-life care, and human-centered design to offer new perspectives on critical challenges within contemporary healthcare, particularly those related to quality of end-of-life care. Broadly speaking, our group seeks to understand how broader social and structural contexts influence access to healthcare and the quality of care.
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Featured Publication
Decision-Making Approaches Used to Limit Potentially Nonbeneficial Life-Prolonging Interventions
Batten JN, Weiss Goitiandia S, Axelrod JK, Chernicoff HO, Nichol AA, Pereira LM, Blythe JA, Kruser JM, Dzeng E
We describe how hospital-based clinicians report approaching decisions with patients and families to limit potentially non-beneficial life-prolonging interventions. In our qualitative study with 101 clinician interviews conducted at 3 academic medical centers, we found that clinicians experienced challenges attempting to limit potentially nonbeneficial interventions using the approaches recommended in professional society policy statements (i.e., shared decision-making and institutional processes to address disagreement with patients or surrogates). Clinicians described using alternate approaches (e.g., stating a plan to limit interventions, explicitly not offering interventions, not mentioning interventions) to limit interventions without a shared decision or institutional process. Use of these alternate approaches may be a workaround in response to the challenges faced when using recommended approaches to limit interventions in the context of a health care system with a default tendency toward life prolongation
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