Attending Physician, Palliative Care Service, Massachusetts General Hospital
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
| 1993 | BA, Psychology, University of Chicago |
| 1997 | MD, Medicine, University of Chicago School of Medicine |
| 1997-1998 | Intern, Transitional, Andrews Air Force Base (AFB), MD |
| 2001 | DPH, Public Health, University of Cambridge, England |
| 2002-2005 | Resident, Internal Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center |
| 2005-2006 | Fellow, Palliative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) |
As a palliative medicine clinician at MGH, Juliet Jacobsen, MD, DPH, has been extensively involved with the care of dying patients and the teaching of palliative medicine to clinical fellows. She has a particular interest in how patients process prognostic information and come to terms with serious illness. This body of work hopes to identify patterns of behavior and reactions to serious news that may be confusing to clinicians, but that should be understood as within the normal range of behavior.
In addition to work with patients, Dr. Jacobsen has also explored the clinician perspective of talking with patients about serious news. She was the Principal Investigator for a quality improvement project that set about to improve how physicians and staff discussed advance care planning (ACP) with patients. Through this project, she created a cognitive framework for discussing ACP with patients and families effectively.
Dr. Jacobsen's interest in how patients process serious news and how clinicians communicate serious news has informed both her scholarship and her teaching contributions, as well as her clinical practice. Her future plans are to continue to define communication practice in a rigorous and academic manner, and to pass on this teaching to residents and fellows.