Profile Image

Lauren J. Gleason, MD, MPH

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Section of Geriatrics & Palliative Medicine

Dr. Lauren J. Gleason is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine. She completed her medical degree at University at Buffalo School of Medicine, followed by her residency in internal medicine at University of Rochester and a geriatrics fellowship through the Harvard Multicampus Program. She also completed an MPH in clinical effectiveness at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a geriatrician at UChicago Medicine and also cares for patients at UChicago Medicine Senior Care – South Shore and Symphony of South Shore where she is co–medical director. She also serves as the medical director on the inpatient geriatrics consult service.
She is the project director of a HRSA–funded Geriatrics Academic Career Award (GACA). Through this project, she leads geriatrics educational initiatives for health care professionals, students and community members around the 4Ms (Medications, Mobility, Mentation, Matters Most). Her interests involve development and implementation of IHI Age–Friendly QI initiatives and improving quality of care for older adults in the health system. At UChicago, she served on the interprofessional team alongside orthopedics, hospital medicine, physical and occupational therapies, pharmacy, and social work to design the hip fracture protocol. She has partnered with the emergency department on a falls initiative to improve screening for falls and education around falls as a sentinel event in the emergency department and co–hosted two Geriatric Emergency Department Educational Symposia which were attended by interprofessional teams. Currently, she is working on implementing universal delirium screening in the hospital system. In her role at Symphony of South Shore, Dr. Gleason led the nursing home team and staff through its COVID–19 management. She collaborated with UCM infectious disease and geriatrics faculty, geriatrics fellows and others, in implementing novel cohorting and medical management of COVID–19 and developed communication templates to assist families during the on–going visitor restrictions. Her work resulted in 5 publications. She has also been involved in clinical teaching through the AHRQ–IHI COVID–19 Nursing Home