Fostering Improvement in End-of-Life Decision Science (FIELDS) Program

The Fostering Improvement in End-of-Life Decision Science (FIELDS) Program was launched in 2012 by Dr. Scott Halpern of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania with support from the Otto Haas Charitable Trust. 



The FIELDS Program's core goals are to understand and improve upon the ways in which end-of-life decisions are made.  We believe that end-of-life decisions often are influenced by "choice architecture" - that is, the ways in which choices are presented and the environments in which decisions are made. Rather than passively accepting these influences on choice, we use approaches from psychology, economics, epidemiology, and sociology to design scalable interventions to increase the probabilities that end-of-life choices match the goals of patients, family members, providers, and society.