Scott D. Halpern

About

Scott D. Halpern, MD, PhD, M.Bioethics, is the John M. Eisenberg Professor in Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He is a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, a fellow at the Institute on Aging within the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and a senior scholar at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Halpern serves as the director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center and the Behavioral Economics to Transform Trial Enrollment Representativeness (BETTER) Center at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Patient-Oriented Research and Training to Accelerate Learning (Penn PORTAL). His research expertise encompasses end-of-life decision making, critical care health services research, methodological innovations in randomized trial designs, empirical bioethics, organ transplantation, research ethics, and the allocation of scarce resources. His clinical expertise includes critical care medicine and palliative medicine.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Nursing
• Psychiatry
• Family medicine
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Physical therapy
• Intensive care medicine
• Emergency medicine

Selected publications

• Locally Informed Simulation to Predict Hospital Capacity Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Annals of Internal Medicine · 2020-04-07 · 319 citations

  articleSenior author

  BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic challenges hospital leaders to make time-sensitive, critical decisions about clinical operations and resource allocations. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the timing of surges in clinical demand and the best- and worst-case scenarios of local COVID-19-induced strain on hospital capacity, and thus inform clinical operations and staffing demands and identify when hospital capacity would be saturated. DESIGN: Monte Carlo simulation instantiation o…

  PublisherDOI

• Why Diverse Clinical Trial Participation Matters

  New England Journal of Medicine · 2023 · 206 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Equitably Allocating Resources during Crises: Racial Differences in Mortality Prediction Models

  American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine · 2021-03-22 · 101 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Rationale Crisis standards of care (CSCs) guide critical care resource allocation during crises. Most recommend ranking patients on the basis of their expected in-hospital mortality using the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score, but it is unknown how SOFA or other acuity scores perform among patients of different races. Objectives To test the prognostic accuracy of the SOFA score and version 2 of the Laboratory-based Acute Physiology Score (LAPS2) among Black and white pati…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effectiveness and Ethics of Incentives for Research Participation

  JAMA Internal Medicine · 2021 · 77 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Importance: Incentivizing research participation is controversial and variably regulated because of uncertainty regarding whether financial incentives serve as undue inducements by diminishing peoples' sensitivity to research risks or unjust inducements by preferentially increasing enrollment among underserved individuals. Objective: To determine whether incentives improve enrollment in real randomized clinical trials (RCTs) or serve as undue or unjust inducements. Design, Setting, and Participa…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effect of Default Options in Advance Directives on Hospital-Free Days and Care Choices Among Seriously Ill Patients

  JAMA Network Open · 2020 · 50 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Importance: There is limited evidence regarding how patients make choices in advance directives (ADs) or whether these choices influence subsequent care. Objective: To examine whether default options in ADs influence care choices and clinical outcomes. Design, Setting, and Participants: This randomized clinical trial included 515 patients who met criteria for having serious illness and agreed to participate. Patients were enrolled at 20 outpatient clinics affiliated with the University of Pennsy…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant K08HS018406

  NIH · $763k · 2014

• Default palliative care consultation for seriously ill hospitalized patients

  NIH · $2.9M · 2015–2021

• NIH Grant R01CA159932

  NIH · $3.0M · 2016

Frequent coauthors

• Sydney E. S. Brown

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  114 shared

• David A. Asch

  109 shared

• Robert D. Truog

  Harvard University

  106 shared

• Michael O. Harhay

  105 shared

• Nicole B. Gabler

  Wilmington University

  94 shared

• Meeta Prasad Kerlin

  University of Pennsylvania

  93 shared

• Gary E. Weissman

  California University of Pennsylvania

  79 shared

• Elizabeth Cooney

  University College Cork

  71 shared

Labs

• Halpern LabPI

Awards & honors

• John M. Eisenberg, M.D. Professor in Medicine
• Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics,…
• Fellow, Institute on Aging, University of Pennsylvania Healt…
• Senior Scholar, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostat…
• Director, Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Ce…

Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania

• John Q. Trojanowskih-296
• Craig B. Thompsonh-277
• Daniel J Raderh-236