At Dell Seton Medical Center, palliative care physician and Dell Medical School assistant professor Dr. Tyler Jorgensen brings a record player and vinyl records to patients’ rooms — giving people facing difficult diagnoses a way to create meaningful moments when it matters most.
Jorgensen and his team have been doing this since 2022. With about 60 records and a turntable on a rolling cart, they offer a physical interruption to the weight of serious illness. Old favorites do what medicine sometimes can’t: transport patients and their families somewhere else, if only for a song.
The palliative care doctor discovered the power of music during a fellowship in hospice and palliative medicine. He was struggling to connect with a patient when he decided to play some music. After listening to Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the patient opened up — and an idea took hold.
Jorgensen and his team developed ATX-VINyL, or Audio Therapy eXperience-Vinyl for Inpatients Near the end of Life, as a resource to connect patients and their families through music during the last stages of their care.
a vinyl player and vinyl records
This spring, ATX-VINyL grew by close to 500 records, thanks to a two-week community vinyl drive spearheaded by UT Social Work’s Moritz Center for Societal Impact. Andy Langer, the Moritz Center’s co-program director for arts and humanities, secured support from Waterloo Records and Crosley Record Players for a drive that gave Austinites a chance to contribute — and a discount at Waterloo along with the chance to win a Crosley turntable. To expand the program’s reach, Crosley donated four new record players.
“Sometimes it’s about more than research. It’s about innovative programs at the local level,” said Dr. Elisa Borah, director of the Moritz Center for Societal Impact. “We are proud to support programs like ATX-VINyL that show what’s possible when science and medicine meet humanity — and we are all better for it.”
“I can confidently say that our music library increased by nearly sevenfold, which is amazing,” said Jorgensen. “We were recently able to meet a specific patient request for Brazilian jazz. Thanks to the new records, we were able to spin a collection of the Stan Getz Quartet with Astrud Gilberto for her — think ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and mid-20th century chill, jazzy vibes. It really lifted her spirits.”
Jorgensen shared a similar story about a patient who requested the Rolling Stones. “These new records are already helping patients,” he said, noting his team hasn’t finished cataloging them.
“I have truly enjoyed being able to focus more on the human experiencing the illness than the illness itself,” said Jorgensen. “I stress to our residents and medical students that one of our main jobs is to learn to connect with the human inside each patient. Then we will know how to best care for them.”