When it comes to advance care planning (ACP), not all care plans are created equal. The range of what constitutes ACP spans from patients attempting to complete advance directives on their own to in-depth conversations about future care facilitated by clinicians.
In many cases, serious illnesses are a family affair. Spouses, children, siblings and other caregivers are often deeply involved in their loved one’s serious illness, assisting with everything from daily care to emotional support. Although the benefits of advance care planning (ACP) are often framed around the patient, ACP also provides numerous benefits for caregivers.
The right advance care planning (ACP) program can be transformative for organizations that manage a population of people with serious illnesses. Currently, many people with serious illnesses do not receive any ACP services at all; according to Medicare billing data, only 4.2% of seriously ill individuals had an ACP encounter with their physician in 2017.
In spite of seemingly endless cost-saving solutions, it can be difficult for health plans to find solutions that are beneficial and appreciated by physicians, members and plans — but Advance Care Planning (ACP) is one of them.
When people with serious illnesses are faced with the option to improve quality of life or length of life, many feel pressured to choose one or the other — but recent evidence shows that advance care planning (ACP) can help individuals achieve both outcomes simultaneously.
Palliative Care (PC) is not an easily digestible term for most of us. The Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) found that in 2019, public opinion and physician understanding of PC had not changed much over the past decade despite significant growth and milestones achieved by this field of medicine. Physicians have retained a particular confusion around what PC can offer patients. The CAPC survey revealed that physicians are still not able to accurately articulate when to refer to PC; oftentimes, palliative care physicians (palliativists) are asked by our colleagues to simply “do what we do” when it comes to seeing a new patient.
