Attending Physician, Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Palliative Care Consultant, Population Health Management, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Associate Faculty, Ariadne Labs
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
| 1996-2000 | BA, Willamette University, Salem, OR |
| 2003-2005 | Postbaccalaureate Certificate, Columbia University, New York, NY |
| 2005-2009 | MD, Alpert Medical School at Brown University, Providence, RI |
| 2009-2012 | Residency, Internal Medicine, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) |
| 2012-2013 | Fellowship, Hospice and Palliative Medicine, UCSF |
| 2013- | Attending Physician, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston |
Joshua Lakin, MD, teaches primarily in his work as an attending on the inpatient palliative care consult service and intensive palliative care unit at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In these clinical roles, he works as part of an interdisciplinary team providing palliative care to hospitalized patients across a wide variety of services. The palliative care team is frequently staffed with fellows, residents, and students from a variety of schools and professions, and Dr. Lakin deeply values his time as a clinical educator for this group of energized learners.
In addition to his clinical teaching activities, he currently teaches at the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care in the Palliative Care Education and Practice (PCEP), Palliative Care for Hospitalist and Intensivists (PCFHI), and Serious Illness Care Program courses. Furthermore, Dr. Lakin functions as the co-director of the Quality Improvement course for the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellows at Harvard.
In terms of research pursuits, Dr. Lakin is interested in working to build scalable and measurable models for delivering palliative care, especially high-quality serious illness communication, outside of the palliative care consult service setting. He spends his time primarily at the intersection of clinical palliative care and systems work in the Population Health Management realm. He has been leading a program aimed at improving communication around serious illness in the high-risk primary care population at Brigham and Women's Hospital. As part of this work, his group has trained over 70 clinicians in primary care practices, including nurses, social workers, and physicians, in skills around communication in serious illness. They have used these skills and the system supporting them to have conversations with many complicated, high-risk primary care patients. This work has evolved and Dr. Lakin is now working to make this program a sustainable part of ongoing work for the primary care, specialist, and hospital-based teams throughout Partners Healthcare in his role as Palliative Care Consultant to the Population Health Management group.