Dr. Kathryn Engelhardt, MD MS
Dr. Kathryn Engelhardt is a fellowship-trained thoracic surgeon at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Health and its Hollings Cancer Center. She has advanced expertise in cancer care, lung transplantation, and robotic surgery and her clinical interests are surgery of the lung, airway, esophagus, stomach, chest wall, and mediastinum. As part of her practice, she performs surgery using minimally invasive robotic technology for patients diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma and lung cancer.[1]
Education and Career
Dr. Engelhardt attended Cornell University for her undergraduate years, earning a bachelor of arts degree in Classics and Chemistry. She earned her medical degree at the University of Cincinnati, and then completed her internship and residency in General Surgy at the Medical University of South Carolina. She then went on to Barnes-Jewish Hospital at Washington University in St. Louis for two years of advanced training in cardiothoracic surgery. She also received a Master of Science degree in Health Services and Outcomes Research at Northwestern University, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Northwestern Institute for Comparative Effectiveness Research.[1]
Following completion of her fellowship, Dr. Engelhardt returned to MUSC to join the Department of Surgery as an Assistant Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery. She is a member of the Lung and Thoracic Cancer team.
Research
Dr. Engelhardt’s research interests focus on shared decision making (SDM) in patient care. Her long term goal is to provide a generalizable SDM tool that can be applied to surgical decision-making scenarios to ultimately improve the delivery of appropriate care, in keeping with both the patient’s values and their clinical indications.
Her current research projects include:[4]
- Database analyses for lung transplant outcomes, using the UNOS database
- Database analyses for lung cancer and esophageal cancer care delivery, using the National Cancer Database
- 3 scoping reviews:
- For patients considering surgery for a thoracic oncologic disease, do shared decision making interventions improve decision outcome (as measured by decisional regret, decision quality, etc.) as compared to standard care?
- For patients making healthcare decisions, do shared decision interventions facilitate sharing patient-level information (care goals, tolerance of disease states, advanced directives, etc.) with the provider, as compared to standard care?
- What evaluation tools are used to assess the outcome of a shared decision making intervention?
- Implementation of a shared decision tool for patients with early stage lung cancer deciding between surgery and radiation
- Development of a novel shared decision making tool to facilitate provider understanding of patient care goals and tolerance of disease states
Awards
Dr. Engelhardt has earned numerous awards, including the Curtis P. Artz MUSC Surgical Society Award for Excellence, the MUSC Yarbrough Award for Excellence in Resident Research, the Southeastern Surgical Congress Gold Medal Forum, American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress Excellence in Research, and she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Society.[2]
