Plenary Panel | Monday, April 24 | 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. ET
Leading Medical Authority and Public Advocate for Improving Care Through the End of Life
Dr. Byock is an acknowledged visionary and pioneer in palliative care who has made important contributions as a clinician, author, and educator. He is the Founder of the Institute for Human Caring, a component of the Providence Health System, which drives transformation in clinical systems and culture to make caring for whole persons the new normal. The Institute for Human Caring’s change strategies produce measurable and scalable improvements in health care quality and efficiency.
Dr. Byock has been involved in hospice and palliative care since 1978. His research has contributed to conceptual frameworks for the lived experience of illness along a continuum from suffering to wellbeing, measures for subjective quality of life during illness, and counseling methods to support life completion. He is a past president of the Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. From 1996 to 2006 he directed Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care, a national Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program that developed prototypes for concurrent palliative care of people with life-threatening conditions. From 2003 through July 2013, he directed the palliative medicine program at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Dr. Byock has authored numerous articles in academic journals. His first book, Dying Well, (1997) has become a standard in the field of hospice and palliative care. The Four Things That Matter Most, (2004) is widely used as a counseling tool within palliative care as well as pastoral care. The Best Care Possible (2012) tackles the crisis that surrounds illness and dying in America and the transformation that is possible.