Improving patients' end-of-life experiences is an important research focus at Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

Focus Feature:

End of life: Researchers seek to learn needs of sickest patients

Researchers at the Department of Research & Evaluation are working to make the final life transitions better for patients and their families. Using analysis, interviews, data queries, and more, they aim to find out what people want in their final months and days, and how to improve care during that time.

R&E News and Features

  • Kaiser Permanente Dr. Bechien Wu is leading a National Institutes of Health-funded research study to find a way to predict early-stage pancreatic cancer..

    Clinician Investigator seeks to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer

    The National Institutes of Health has awarded Kaiser Permanente a grant to find a way to predict early-stage pancreatic cancer. The principal investigator is Bechien Wu, MD, MPH, a clinician investigator and a gastroenterologist with the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center.

  • Research has shown that a mom’s diabetes could influence child’s risk of autism or ADHD.

    Mom's diabetes could influence child's risk of autism or ADHD

    Since publishing in JAMA about strong associations between a mother’s diabetes and her child’s risk for autism in 2015, researcher Anny Xiang, PhD, has expanded that work to consider other neurological development disorders to find more nuances with the association,  including one published just last month.

  • Kaiser Permanente Dr. Hung Fu Tseng and Dr. Bradley Ackerson have done research that shows that RSV infection can be deadlier than flu in adults.

    RSV infection can be deadlier than flu in adults

    In many ways, the initial symptoms of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus are indistinguishable. But, research published in Clinical Infectious Diseases last month showed that RSV infection may be even more dangerous than the flu in older adults.

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Kaiser Permanente Dr. Bobeck S. Modjtahedi is a Clinician Investigator who studies vision loss including glaucoma testing.

for Dr. Bobeck S. Modjtahedi

Bobeck Modjtahedi, MD,  was 1 of 4 physicians appointed to the 2018 Southern California Permanente Medical Group Clinician Investigator Program. His research involves creating models that can predict a patient’s risk of vision-threatening forms of diabetic retinopathy several years in advance.