Default Palliative Care Consultation for Seriously Ill Hospitalized Patients: A Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Trial.

Importance: Increasing inpatient palliative care delivery is prioritized, but large-scale, experimental evidence of its effectiveness is lacking.

Objective: To determine whether ordering palliative care consultation by default for seriously ill hospitalized patients without requiring greater palliative care staffing increased consultations and improved outcomes.

Design, Setting, And Participants: A pragmatic, stepped-wedge, cluster randomized trial was conducted among patients 65 years or older with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, or kidney failure admitted from March 21, 2016, through November 14, 2018, to 11 US hospitals.

Comparison of Web-Based and Paper Advance Directives: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial.

Background: Digital tools to document care preferences in serious illnesses are increasingly common, but their impact is unknown. We developed a web-based advance directive (AD) featuring (1) modular content eliciting detailed care preferences, (2) the ability to electronically transmit ADs to the electronic health record (EHR), and (3) use of nudges to promote document transmission and sharing.

Objective: To compare a web-based, EHR-transmissible AD to a paper AD.