Advance Care Planning: Best Practice Toolkit for Improving Access to Advance Care Planning Using Telehealth Visits

Abstract

Advance care planning (ACP) predominately occurs during a life-threatening crisis or during an inpatient admission. The primary care provider (PCP) is generally not the healthcare provider addressing ACP at the time of a crisis or during an inpatient admission. Being proactive in limiting ACP decisions with unfamiliar providers, uncomfortable environments, and increasing access to ACP discussions with PCPs are supportive reasons to utilize an ACP telehealth toolkit in primary care. Patients risk having ACP discussions with random providers, environments that don’t provide comfort when having such personal discussions, or not having the peaceful death they deserve without having an ACP in place. Studies have identified positive outcomes from telehealth ACP toolkits use. The use of an ACP toolkit during telehealth ACP visits fosters a collaborative provider-patient relationship. The ACP toolkit would afford the provider and patient an opportunity to engage in advance care planning while increasing the potential for the completion of an advance directive. This project utilizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) framework to support the use of an ACP telehealth toolkit. The use of this toolkit would result in increased ACP discussions within the primary care setting. It would also result in a decrease in initial ACP discussions occurring in uncontrolled environments, a decrease in ACP discussions with providers unfamiliar to patients and provides an opportunity for patients to voice and define what a peaceful death means to them.