Karen Sepucha, PhD

square Karen'Dr. Sepucha is the director of the Health Decision Sciences Center in the General Medicine Division at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Her research and clinical interests involve developing and implementing tools and methods to improve the quality of significant medical decisions made by patients and clinicians. Dr. Sepucha was the medical editor for a series of five breast cancer patient decision aids (PtDAs) developed by the not-for-profit Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making.

The PtDAs have won seven media awards, and Dr. Sepucha has led the dissemination of these programs to dozens of academic and community cancer centers across the country.

She is also responsible for efforts to implement shared decision making tools into primary and specialty care at Partners HealthCare. Her recent research has focused on the development of instruments to measure the quality of decisions.

The decision quality instruments have been used in a national survey of medical decisions, and a subset of the items is being evaluated for use in CAHPS as part of the primary care medical home certification.

Dr. Sepucha has been active in local, national and international efforts to improve decision quality, including the International Patient Decision Aids Standards collaboration.

She has her PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research at Stanford University, with a focus in decision sciences.

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