Robust Advance Care Planning (ACP) is essential for ensuring quality of care and aligning healthcare utilization with care preferences when patients near the end of their lives. This information needs to be complete, accurate and accessible for clinicians to be able to direct care appropriately.
While both patients and physicians recognize the importance of ACP, there lacks a method to make this vital information available to caregivers when patients lack the ability to express their wishes. A large multi center study of hospitalized patients found that only 47% of doctors knew when their patients didn’t want cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). With less than half of doctors being aware of their patients’ wishes about CPR, there must be significant barriers to accessing end of life (EOL) care preferences.
