Steve Pantilat, MD

Steven Pantilat, MD, is a Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, the Alan M. Kates and John M. Burnard Endowed Chair in Palliative Care, and the founding Director of the UCSF Palliative Care Program. The Palliative Care Program encompasses clinical, educational, training, and research programs in palliative care.  The clinical program includes an interdisciplinary Palliative Care Consultation Service and a 2-bed inpatient palliative care unit called the Comfort Care Suites at the UCSF Medical Center and an outpatient palliative care service called the Symptom Management Service based at the UCSF Cancer Center.  Educational programs include courses for undergraduate medical and pharmacy students and graduate nursing students, electives in palliative care for medical and nurse practitioner students and medical residents, and training for physicians in practice. In another educational endeavor, Dr. Pantilat, along with colleagues at UCSF, is a co-editor of an major, ongoing series in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) focused on improving end-of-life care titled “Perspectives on Care at the Close of Life” and recently authored, along with colleagues at UCSF, a series of reports on the State of Hospital-Based Palliative Care in California for the California HealthCare Foundation.  Dr. Pantilat also directs training efforts as the Director of the Palliative Care Leadership Center(SM) (PCLC) initiative at UCSF, a program funded by the California HealthCare Foundation, the Archstone Foundation, and the JEHT Foundation. The goal of the UCSF PCLC is to help teams from hospitals across the country to establish palliative care programs in their institutions.  To date, the UCSF PCLC has trained teams from over 125 hospitals. Dr. Pantilat’s research focuses on improving end-of-life care in hospitals and on palliative care for people with heart disease.  Dr. Pantilat has published widely in the areas of physician communication, palliative care, and hospital medicine. He is currently involved in several research projects focused on palliative care including evaluating a palliative care consultation service, determining the prevalence of palliative care services in California, and, through a grant from the Alafi Family Foundation, understanding the palliative care needs of people with heart failure. Dr. Pantilat is Board Certified in palliative medicine and internal medicine, is a Soros Foundation Project on Death in America Faculty Scholar, a recipient of a K-23, Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award from the National Institute on Aging, and in 2007 was a Fulbright Senior Scholar studying palliative care in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Pantilat is also a hospitalist and is a nationally recognized expert in hospital medicine.  He is the Past-President, a past member of the Board of Directors, and the former Chair of the Ethics committee for the Society of Hospital Medicine.  Dr. Pantilat is a full-time faculty member in the Program in Medical Ethics at UCSF and serves on the UCSF Medical Center Ethics Committee.