Life as a Healthcare CIO: Following up on yesterday’s post about ICU dashboards, I think it is equally important to document end of life care preferences in the electronic health record. The HIT Standards Committee has been charged in 2013 with developing the standards for structured data capture of end of life care preferences.
At BIDMC, we’ve already designed an approach in conjunction with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Conversation Ready project. Conversation Ready is a collaborative effort between the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and a handful of “pioneer” institutions, of which BIDMC is one, to ensure that we’re ready to 1. receive/elicit patients’ goals of care or preferences, 2. record them in our systems, 3. retrieve them when needed, and thereby 4. do a better job respecting them.