Community Physician Spotlight: Allen Namath Combines Clinical Care and Research in His Home-Grown Career

Growing up, Allen Namath, MD, knew he wanted to work in the field of medicine. He just wasn’t sure if it would be in research or clinical care. In high school, he volunteered as a research assistant at the Palo Alto VA Hospital. In college, he worked on the clinical side at Stanford Hospital, preparing paper charts and escorting patients to their cars at discharge. While he wrestled with the direction his career would take, one thing never waivered—where he wanted to work.

“I’m attached to the area,” said Namath, who is Palo Alto born and bred. A graduate of Gunn High School and Stanford University, Namath has spent his entire life in the community where he grew up. “Having lived my whole life here, my entire family is here, I had some geographic ties that I wanted to try and maintain,” he said.

Namath is a Critical Care and Pulmonary Medicine specialist with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). Many of the patients he sees in clinic or in the hallways at Stanford Hospital are people he has known his whole life—teachers, coaches, family, friends, neighbors. “That is part of the reward of practicing in the same place for such a long time,” he said.

After graduating from Stanford with a degree in biology, Namath worked for the Stanford Human Genome Project, ringside to one of the biggest breakthroughs in medicine in the past two decades. After four years in research, Namath felt a lingering calling to patient care. So he applied to Stanford School of Medicine, where he completed his medical school education, and his internship, residency and fellowship training. His specialty, he said, gives him the best of two worlds, the long-term relationships that physicians build treating patients over their lifespan, and the stimulation that comes from caring for people who are critically ill in the ICU. The field also allows him to draw from all of his medical training as he cares for patients experiencing a broad range of medical problems.

He feeds his continuing interest in research with a new focus on improving the delivery of care. He is part of PAMF’s quality improvement efforts, and sits on multiple quality improvement committees at Stanford Hospital.

“I oversee PAMF’s efforts to track and ensure that we are implementing best practices to provide the highest quality of care for our patients,” said Namath, who divides his time between the Pulmonary Medicine clinic at PAMF, and one-week rotations in the Stanford ICU. He sees firsthand the hiccups in care that can occur as patients crisscross the health care system.

One of his biggest passions is the work he has done with the Stanford Biodesign Program. The program takes professionals with backgrounds in medicine, engineering and business, and immerses them together to develop solutions to unmet clinical needs. As a critical care specialist, Namath continues to advise a team from the Stanford Biodesign Program that is focused on improving end of life care.

While most of medicine has shifted to an electronic system, documents such as advanced directives and the Physician Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST), have been paper-based. That dislocation has marginalized the information, said Namath. “If you have a whole system that’s electronic, but you have two very important things that have been kept on paper, it means that by design, you’re keeping it out of the system that everyone is used to looking at,” he said. “When that documentation isn’t traveling with the patient, you start to get mismatches in how care is provided compared with how care is desired.” Namath sees this happen even between his own clinic and Stanford Hospital, just two miles away. He recounts the story of one of his own patients whose advance directive was filed away at home when he was hospitalized at Stanford.

“I found him in the Stanford ICU on life support, even though I knew we had completed the conversations about what he did and didn’t want, but the information just couldn’t be passed along in time to be known by the people making the decision for this patient,” said Namath. “And we know nationally this happens all the time.”

The Stanford Biodesign team’s efforts, and Namath’s lobbying at the State Capitol in Sacramento, have led to legislation to pilot an electronic registry for end of life care documentation in California. A similar electronic registry already exists in Oregon, where it is working well, said Namath. The goal, he said, is to have a single source of truth that is accessible to all.

“Every hospital in America could benefit from doing something like this,” he said. “This is one of those rare examples where the solution will work once it’s implemented, and it has the potential to have a big impact everywhere it is used. You don’t get opportunities to make an impact so broadly that often.”