Automated Identification of Patients with Advanced Illness.

Early identification of advanced illness patients within an inpatient population is essential in order to establish the patient's goals of care. Having goals of care conversations enables hospital patients to dictate a plan for care in concordance with their values and wishes. These conversations allow a patient to maintain some control, rather than be subjected to a default care process that may not be desired and may not provide benefit.

Changing the Care Paradigm for Patients: Advanced Illness Beds Care Model.

Background: Over 90 million Americans suffer from advanced illness (AI) and spend their last days of life in critical care units receiving costly, unwanted, aggressive medical care.

Objective: Evaluate the impact of a specialized care model in medical/surgical units for hospitalized geriatric patients and patients with complex care requirements where designated AI beds align care with patient's wishes/goals, minimize aggressive interventions, and influence efficient resource utilization.

Design: US based multi-facility retrospective, longitudinal descriptive study of screened positive AI patients in AI Beds (N = 1,237) from 3 facilities from 2015 to 2017.