Dr.
Carlson is an Instructor in the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development
at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She earned her doctorate from Yale University
in the Division of Health Policy and Administration with a concentration in
economics. She is the recipient of an Olive Branch Scholar
Award of the National Palliative Care Research Center in New York. Dr.
Carlson’s research focuses on the quality of hospice and palliative care
services and access to services for older adults with serious illness.
Specifically, she has evaluated the effect of hospice agency characteristics
(e.g., for-profit or nonprofit ownership and Medicare certification status) on
the quality of hospice care and was the first to document substantial variation
across hospice agencies nationally in the quality of care delivered to patients
and families including nursing care, physician
care, medication management,
psychosocial care (i.e., bereavement care, spiritual counseling), and caregiver
support. She has also studied the impact
of the timing of hospice enrollment on the well-being of caregivers of seriously
ill older adults.As a Brookdale Leadership in Aging Fellow, Dr. Carlson will seek to improve access to hospice care by estimating the current availability and distribution of hospice agencies across the country and determining how access to hospice care varies by key characteristics of communities including racial and ethnic composition, per capita income, median age, educational attainment, region, and degree of rurality. This information is critical for understanding disparities in use of hospice and for informing policies to increase the availability of hospice to older adults with serious illness and their families.
Dr. Carlson holds an M.B.A. from New York University’s Stern School of Business, an M.P.H. from Columbia University’s School of Public Health and a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the College of the Holy Cross.