Dr. Salimah Meghani has a long-standing commitment to advancing the field of palliative care through scholarship and service. During 2005-2007, she served on the Pennsylvania Department of Aging’s state taskforce: Improving Quality at the End of Life for Pennsylvanians. This committee assessed the status of palliative care in the state and formulated recommendations for improving advanced illness care for Pennsylvanians.

Between 2007-2009, Dr. Meghani served on the Pennsylvania Patient Life-Sustaining Wishes Advisory Committee. This committee was appointed by the PA Secretary of Health to assess the feasibility of implementing Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment paradigm in Pennsylvania. This effort led to the endorsement of Pennsylvania POLST to ensure that seriously ill patients’ treatment wishes are documented and honored across healthcare settings.

More recently (2012-2014), Dr. Meghani served as a member of the Institute of Medicine (now NAM) Study Committee that authored the report, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life. Dr. Meghani’s main research interest involves palliative care, specifically understanding and addressing sources of disparities in symptom management and outcomes among vulnerable populations. Her earlier work explicated sources of racial disparities in cancer pain outcomes and clarified the role of patient-provider factors contributing to shaping preferences and adherence funded by highly competitive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Challenge Grant. This longitudinal, interdisciplinary study leveraged methods from behavioral economics and patient-reported outcomes to understand sources of clinical disparities, preference-formation, consequent medication taking behavior, and clinical outcomes among cancer patients.

Currently, Dr. Meghani is leading an American Cancer Society-funded project to elicit patients-family dyad generated ideas to improve cancer pain management and to convert ideas to actionable interventions specific to decreasing disparities.