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.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gen Intern Med
December 2023
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.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJAMA Netw Open
February 2022
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.