Kei Ouchi, MD, MPH

I am a practicing emergency physician and a home hospital physician (providing hospital-level care at patients’ homes) engaged in clinically oriented research. After growing up in Osaka, Japan, I received my MD from Georgetown and MPH from Harvard. As a physician board certified in Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine, I see a gap in the quality of end-of-life care for seriously ill older adults and their goals. As more seriously ill older adults visit the ED, the role of the ED in our health care system is expanding from providing only acute, disease-oriented care (e.g., gunshot wounds) to include patient-centered, goal-concordant care (e.g., end-of-life care) that requires the application of geriatrics and palliative care principles. Emergency Medicine specialty is already experiencing this shift yet lacks scientific evidence to implement effective goal-concordant care for seriously ill older adults. My research aims to leverage the ED visit as a sentinel moment to facilitate advance care planning for seriously ill older adults. I envision a future where our specialty will embrace the principles of geriatrics and palliative medicine to provide end-of-life care concordant with patients’ goals. For my academic work, I have received numerous awards, including the Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders Career

Development Award in Aging from the National Institute on Aging, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award from U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and the Sojourns Scholars Leadership Award from the Cambia Health Foundation.

Prior AGEM experience: I served as the Member-at-large from 2018 to 2020 and contributed to maintaining the Author Spotlight section of the website. I also served as the secretary from 2020 to 2021 to continue to work with the executive committee with key decision-making to serve our members.

Why I’m running for the office: I have not served as the president of AGEM yet. I hope to serve as the president and lead our advocacy efforts for geriatric issues in the ED. I will also help foster the career development of early-stage, geriatric investigators. I aim to help cultivate the new generations of emergency physicians interested in geriatric issues in the ED.