This summer, I worked with Dr. Norma B. Coe and Melissa Berkowitz at the Policy and Economics of Disability, Aging, and Long-Term Care (PEDAL) Lab with the overarching goal of measuring the effect of the health system reforms in changing the delivery of end-of-life care. Individually, the goal of my research was to explore how public discourse and perceptions of durable power of attorney and default surrogate law passages may have affected end-of-life care outcomes. To do so, I conducted literature reviews on the effectiveness and various applications of Google Trends as a possible proxy for quantifying public perception and media attention, collected data from Google Trends on the relative search volume of certain end-of-life care related search terms, such as, “living will”, “default surrogate”, and “durable power of attorney” to visualize peaks in media attention, and lastly, collected, read, and analyzed historical to present day newspaper articles from different states to better understand public responses to end-of-life care policies. I Identified Google Trends as a viable means to quantify public discourse, however, in certain states, data is limited.