Medicare Coverage For Advance Care Planning: Just The First Step

Advance care planning: just do it!

Nearly everyone agrees that helping patients to plan ahead by defining their goals of care is a worthy endeavor. Those who disagree probably have the good sense to keep it to themselves. Advance care planning (ACP) is one way to aspire to the triple aim of improving care, improving health, and reducing costs, promoted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Centers for Medicare and Med...

Advance care planning for paediatric patients.

Medical and technological advances have increased survival rates and enhanced the quality of life for infants, children and youths with chronic life-threatening conditions. Advance care planning includes the process of discussing life-sustaining treatments and establishing long-term care goals. Paediatric health care practitioners have an ethical obligation to educate themselves about this aspe...

Advance care planning in primary care.

Advance care planning and the older patient.

Making treatment decisions for older people is difficult, because of the complex interplay of their multiple co-morbidities, but also because of the fine balance of risks vs. benefit in any chosen management plan. This becomes even more difficult when they lose the capacity to tell us what they want, and often in such situations we have to rely on information from others in order to make decisi...

Advance care planning in the elderly.

Key components of advance care planning (ACP) for the elderly include choosing a surrogate decision maker, identifying personal values, communicating with surrogates and clinicians, documenting wishes in advance directives, and translating values and preferences for future medical care into medical orders. ACP often involves multiple brief discussions over time. This article outlines common ben...