About
Yelba Castellon-Lopez, MD, MSHPM, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Castellon-Lopez, a bilingual (English/Spanish) physician and researcher, earned a medical degree from the UCLA Department of Medicine in 2012, and a master of science degree in health policy and management in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in 2017. While her research interest has focused on the trajectory of diabetes among ethnic minorities, particularly in Latino populations, she has a strong interest in developing community-based interventions and decision aids to empower and engage minority elders in making their health-care decisions. Dr. Castellon-Lopez plans to continue evaluating the effectiveness of using a shared-decision aid to promote advanced care planning among minority elders that originated from a shared-decision-making intervention she implemented and evaluated while a fellow in the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program delivered by clinical pharmacists in a Los Angeles county safety-net clinic that serves predominately low-income Latinos.
Cohort
2017-18
Projects
- “Promoting advanced care planning in older Latino adults though shared decision making.” In this study, Dr. Castellon-Lopez will partner with two community-based senior centers in the greater Los Angeles area to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness and acceptability of using decision aids to elicit advanced care planning preferences among minority adults who are not faced with a life threatening diagnosis. The results of this pilot study will be used to inform a larger, future randomized control trial testing a culturally tailored decision aid delivered by respected religious clergy already engaged in helping people think about death and dying, in order to improve advanced care planning among minority elderly.