When it comes to talking about end-of-life care, it isn’t an easy conversation to have for either patients or providers. The CA HealthCare Foundation found that 80% of people who are seriously ill want to talk to their doctor about end-of-life care but only 7% have actually discussed their options.
“These are important yet hard things to talk about,” Dr. Matthew Gonzales, chief medical information officer at the Institute for Human Caring at Providence St. Joesph Health, said during a HIMSS20 Digital event. “They aren’t entirely the easiest thing to dig into and process – and talk about in our society, and they are ultimately so important to the way that we are trying to make sure that we work with our patients and families to be able to achieve what matters to them.”
Providence is stepping up to help facilitate these discussions using videos, an effort by the Advanced Care Planning (ACP) organization to provide a platform full of short videos aimed at patient education, to address this. Researchers found that before these videos only 3% of patients had conversations about advanced care planning. By the end of the trial, close to 40% had those conversations.
Read more on how Providence is teaming up with ACP to implement the tool into its system.
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