Patient voices get lost in today's health care system and the consequences can be particularly costly — financially, emotionally and even spiritually — at the end of life.
Most people want to die peacefully at home, surrounded by family, yet too many spend their final days in a health care facility, subject to invasive treatments they would have waved off had they known what was coming.
Those are the views of Nneka Sederstrom, a medical ethicist in the Twin Cities who recently launched a startup called UzObi to help patients better communicate their values to doctors.
Based in Prior Lake, the company sells an online tool that can help people clarify their priorities and document their wishes, thereby creating a resource that can guide health care decisions not just at death but throughout a patient's life.
Sederstrom, who is the chief health equity officer at Hennepin Healthcare, talked with the Star Tribune about her idea for the company, the moral distress she's witnessed among caregivers during COVID and how she learned an important lesson in medical ethics from a dose of snake venom.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What's the connection between UzObi and your father's death?
A: When my dad died in December 2020, everybody's initial instinct was to say: "I'm sorry." And, you know, I'm grateful, because I'm sad that he's not here. But his death wasn't traumatic. It wasn't devastating. It was exactly what death is supposed to be.