Publications by authors named "Jennifer Itty"

Article Synopsis
  • - The study focused on integrating a new role, Palliative Care Educators (PCEs), into hospital settings to improve advance care planning (ACP) and goals-of-care (GOC) conversations for seriously ill and older patients.
  • - Interviews with 24 clinical staff revealed four main themes: PCEs laid a foundation for ongoing palliative care, creative revisions were necessary for their implementation, strong communication ensured continuity of care, and building trust led to greater role acceptance.
  • - Despite some challenges in creating this new role, it was viewed as beneficial in reducing staff workloads and enhancing patient engagement in important care discussions.
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Importance: Despite the benefits of goals-of-care (GOC) communication, many hospitalized individuals never communicate their goals or preferences to clinicians.

Objective: To assess whether a GOC video intervention delivered by palliative care educators (PCEs) increased the rate of GOC documentation.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This pragmatic, stepped-wedge cluster randomized clinical trial included patients aged 65 years or older admitted to 1 of 14 units at 2 urban hospitals in New York and Boston from July 1, 2021, to October 31, 2022.

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Advance care planning (ACP) discussions seek to guide future serious illness care. These discussions may be recorded in the electronic health record by documentation in clinical notes, structured forms and directives, and physician orders. Yet, most studies of ACP prevalence have only examined structured electronic health record elements and ignored data existing in notes.

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Background: Advance Care Planning (ACP) comprises an iterative communication process aimed at understanding patients' goals, values, and preferences in the context of considering and preparing for future medical treatments and decision making in serious illness. The COVID pandemic heightened patients' and clinicians' awareness of the need for ACP.

Objective: Our goal was to explore the experiences of clinicians and administrators in the context of an intervention to improve ACP during the COVID pandemic.

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Introduction: Despite the known benefit to patients and families, discussions about goals, values and preferences for medical care in advancing serious illness often do not occur. Many system and clinician factors, such as patient and clinician reticence and shortage of specialty palliative care teams, contribute to this lack of communication. To address this gap, we designed an intervention to promote goals-of-care conversations and palliative care referrals in the hospital setting by using trained palliative care educators and video decision aids.

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Importance: COVID-19 has disproportionately killed older adults and racial and ethnic minority individuals, raising questions about the relevance of advance care planning (ACP) in this population. Video decision aids and communication skills training offer scalable delivery models.

Objective: To assess whether ACP video decision aids and a clinician communication intervention improved the rate of ACP documentation during an evolving pandemic, with a focus on African American and Hispanic patients.

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