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Improving advance directive documentation in the electronic medical records at a comprehensive community cancer center.

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191 Background: Advance directives (AD) are critical to understanding a patient’s wishes should they be unable to communicate. Lacking these documents may lead to decreased knowledge regarding end-of-life wishes, and… Click to show full abstract

191 Background: Advance directives (AD) are critical to understanding a patient’s wishes should they be unable to communicate. Lacking these documents may lead to decreased knowledge regarding end-of-life wishes, and hinder end-of-life care. Having an AD uploaded into the electronic medical record (EMR) ensures these documents are available to all providers. This project sought to improve, from a cohort of patients with documented discussions regarding ADs, the proportion with the document in the EMR. At Valley-Mount Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Care, baseline data analysis shows only 20% of clinic patients for whom an AD was documented had an AD uploaded to their EMR. Methods: This project was created through the ASCO Quality Training Program and sought to increase the proportion of AD’s in patient’s EMR's. The current workflow of obtaining AD's at Valley-Mount Sinai was first identified. In our setting, the medical assistant (MA) asks new patient if they have an AD and uploads the AD into the chart if available. Following a structured cause and effect exercise, two Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles were prioritized. The first, beginning 10/15/18, required that the new patient nurse navigator discuss the value of AD’s with the patient when scheduling initial visits. The second PDSA, completed 11/12/18 for the MA’s, was an educational session reviewing AD’s and how to discuss them. Results: Pre- and post-intervention data is depicted in the Table. At baseline, 20% of the 114 patients with existing AD discussions had these documents uploaded into their EMR. After PDSA-2, 37.1% of the 78 patient cohort had an AD uploaded. Conclusions: Through clinical education and revising the current process, this project increased uploading AD’s into EMR’s from 20% to 37.1%. This demonstrates that small but effective interventions can increase the proportion of patients with AD’s in their charts. Future PDSA’s will focus on patient and RN education to further improve these numbers. [Table: see text]

Keywords: advance; advance directive; cancer; improving advance; electronic medical; patient

Journal Title: Journal of Clinical Oncology
Year Published: 2019

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