Jumpstart Guide

At the Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence, which Dr. Kross co-directs, they have taken a broad lens to thinking about palliative care in general. They have initiatives focused on education, clinical operations, quality improvement, research, and both primary and specialty palliative care.

The Jumpstart is a communication priming tool. The idea behind the Jumpstart Guide is to get clinicians and patients talking to one another about what is most important to patients. What do they value the most? The guide should help frame treatment plans that can be aligned with individual patient goals of care.

"Primary palliative care is really the primary care skills that all clinicians who care for patients with serious illness should have," says Kross. "And so, we selected this communication priming intervention as one tool to try to improve the communication that occurs between all clinicians who care for patients with serious illness and their patients."

Dr. Erin Kross is an associate professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at the University of Washington and co-Director of the Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence at UW Medicine. Dr. Kross received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Wellesley College and her medical degree from the University of Iowa College of Medicine. She completed training in internal medicine at the University of Iowa and in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Washington. She joined the faculty at UW in 2010.

Dr. Kross practices medicine at Harborview Medical Center, where she attends in the ICU, on pulmonary and palliative care consultation services, and in a general pulmonary outpatient clinic. She directs an active research and quality improvement program which focuses on improving palliative care for patients with serious illness and their families, with current funding from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Aging at the NIH. She co-directs a T32 from NHLBI for post-doctoral research training in palliative care and mentors many residents, fellows, and junior faculty. In addition to her clinical work and research program, she is a clinical educator for trainees and members of the interprofessional team.