Rachelle Bernacki, MD, MS

Director of Quality Initiatives
Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Rachelle Bernacki, MD, MS is the Director of Quality Initiatives in the Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School.  She attends on the palliative care consult service as well as the inpatient palliative care unit at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  She is a graduate of the John’s Hopkins School of Medicine and completed her residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Washington.  Subsequently, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Chicago, where she also completed a fellowship in geriatrics and medical ethics.  She served as the fellow-in-training chair for the American Geriatrics Society from 2005-06.  Her main clinical and research interest is in determining and communicating prognosis to severely ill hospitalized patients with multiple comorbidities.  She is board certified in palliative medicine as well as geriatrics.