October 2019

Many factors can prevent individuals from examining, expressing, and documenting their wishes when faced with serious illness. On September 19, Discern Health Director Theresa Schmidt presented innovative solutions for improving access to advance care planning during the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) webinar, Identifying and Overcoming Barriers to Advance Care Planning.

Theresa joined industry colleagues from Stratis Health, HopeHealth, and Vital Decisions to discuss the latest research on best practices and regional variation in strategies for addressing the barriers to communicating and documenting care wishes and associated delivery of care.

Theresa’s presentation focused on the work Discern has done in partnership with C-TAC around one of the Advanced Care Transformation (ACT) Index measures: percentage of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries in each state with billing codes for advance care planning. Discern performed a literature review, analyzed data, and conducted interviews with key stakeholders to identify evidence-based best practices to encourage advance care planning.

Download our summary of the webinar here.

Watch the webinar recording here.

A full report of the work Discern completed around the ACT Index measure will be available soon. Read the executive summary here.

For more information, please contact Theresa Schmidt at tschmidt@discernhealth.com.