Advance Care Planning

Advance care planning (ACP) is the process of communicating with patients and their families about the type of healthcare the patient wishes to receive. The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) has ACP as a measure, communicating to providers the value of having ACP discussions with older adults. ACP provides an opportunity for patients to communicate what is most important to them for end-of-life healthcare. Each HSC Health provider is a Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) eligible clinician. The MIPS measure for ACP is assessed over a calendar year (from January 1st to December 31st). In September 2019, an online learning module educating providers on the basics of Advance Care Planning was made available for the HSC Clinical Practice Group. In this research project, we evaluate the effect of the online ACP module on primary care providers (Family Medicine and Geriatrics) performing and documenting advance care planning. Data from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2020 was extracted, and descriptive statistics used to compare overall performance rates between 2019 and 2020. Results indicate that from 2019 to 2020 providers in Geriatrics and Family Medicine collectively improved in documenting that ACP was reviewed. Providing education on the importance of ACP and how to perform an ACP visit is one of the interventions that has promoted improvement in the overall practice performance on the MIPS measure of ACP from 2019 to 2020.