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NIH grant 1K24AG104059-01: Serious Illness, Serious Challenges: Mentoring Researchers to Improve Care for Older Adults and Families
Institute: {'code': 'AG', 'abbreviation': 'NIA', 'name': 'National Institute on Aging', 'admin_org_id': '12500002', 'admin_funding_url': ''}. PI: Rashmi Kumar Sharma. Award: $208907.
Start: 2026-09-11T00:00:00.
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
The goal of this K24 Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research is to provide Rashmi Sharma,
MD, MHS, a general internist and palliative care physician, with the protected time and resources to expand
her research and mentoring program focused on improving outcomes for older adults with serious illness,
particularly those at higher risk for suboptimal care due to language and communication barriers. Effective
goals-of-care communication is essential to ensuring high-quality, goal-concordant care for older adults with
serious illness and their families, yet such discussions remain infrequent, delayed, and of variable quality.
Addressing these gaps is especially critical for older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias
(ADRD), who, in the context of progressive cognitive decline, are often excluded from shared decision making
and risk receiving burdensome, goal-discordant care. Although interventions exist to improve goals-of-care
communication, few have been tailored to the specific challenges of ADRD, and none have been designed to
address language-discordant encounters, leaving a critical gap in strategies to support goal-concordant care.
Closing this gap offers the opportunity to not only improve outcomes for older adults with ADRD and limited-
English proficiency, but to generate generalizable approaches that strengthen communication and decision
making for all older adults and families facing serious illness. Dr. Sharma’s research program is distinguished
by advanced qualitative and mixed-methods expertise, robust community engagement and mentorship, and
the design of multi-level palliative care interventions to address gaps in care for understudied populations. She
is an established leader in interdisciplinary patient-oriented research and has a strong record of successfully
mentoring more than 30 trainees and junior faculty across medicine, nursing, social work, and public health.
The scientific aims of this proposal are to leverage existing R01 data and infrastructure and collect new data to:
1) identify gaps in the occurrence and quality of documented goals-of-care discussions for older adults with
ADRD and limited-English proficiency, and 2) adapt an evidence-based communication priming intervention,
employing qualitative data collection and user-centered design, to increase interpreter-mediated goals-of-care
discussions. Through the proposed career development plan, Dr. Sharma will strengthen her skills in
implementation science, user-centered methods, and digital health tools to accelerate the development and
dissemination of innovative, scalable interventions. These activities will expand her mentoring capacity, provide
mentees with rigorous and impactful opportunities, and yield strategies to improve communication, decision
making, and quality of life for older adults with serious illness and their families, addressing key priorities of the
National Institute on Aging.document fetched 2026-09-20 02:42