Louisiana Works on EHR Integration of Advanced Care Planning Documents
The Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum and Vynca, a vendor offering advance care planning solutions, have announced that Ochsner Health, Louisiana’s largest nonprofit academic healthcare system, has gone live on Vynca’s EHR-integrated advance care planning solution.
Now Louisiana Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (LaPOST) forms in the statewide LaPOST Registry will be available directly within Ochsner’s electronic health record (EHR), ensuring patients’ end-of-life treatment wishes are documented and accessible by healthcare providers.
“Digital access for vital portable medical order documents – both for family members and the care team – ensures that everyone is aware of a patient’s end-of-life treatment decisions. In medical situations where a patient is unable to speak for themselves, this planning solution can help alleviate the stress and anxiety of not only the patient, but also their loved ones,” said Susan Nelson, M.D., system chair of palliative medicine at Ochsner Health, in a statement. “By teaming up with Vynca and the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum, Ochsner hopes to raise awareness about the importance of discussing end-of-life treatment wishes with family members and documenting these desires in an easily accessible format.”
The partnership between the Quality Forum and Vynca will enable healthcare providers in all care settings across Louisiana to electronically complete and access patients’ LaPOST forms. This collaboration further enhances the state’s current advance care planning programs, which include LaPOST physician orders that outline the types of medical treatment that patients with serious, life-limiting illness wish to receive as they approach the end of their life to ensure that the provided care aligns with care goals and preferences.
“Enabling care across the care continuum remains our focus, and I am thrilled to welcome Ochsner to deepen the collective goal we have with Vynca,” said Cindy Munn, CEO of the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum, in a statement. “Over the last decade, the Quality Forum has proudly partnered with leading initiatives in advance care planning education that empower healthcare consumers and providers alike. Vynca continues to show us how we can not only expand adoption of the statewide electronic registry but become a national leader in the value that embracing these practices and products can have on patient care.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased awareness about the need for advance care planning, as individuals of all ages are now considering their end-of-life wishes and formalizing those in advance care plans. The LaPOST Registry digitizes these care preferences and seamlessly manages them, so that documents reflect patients’ most up-to-date preferences and are digitally available to healthcare providers across all care settings, including primary care, hospice, nursing homes and specialty clinics. With the EHR-integrated Vynca solution, Ochsner can access these crucial documents at the point-of-care.
“COVID-19 has thrust the need for these conversations and the digitization of advance care planning into the spotlight, as it not only ensures that end-of-life care preferences are always accessible within the EHR, but that they are also being honored,” explained Ryan Van Wert, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Vynca, in a statement. “Many people would prefer to be consulted about their final days in the hospital and what interventions and comfort measures are most important. Having this information captured and available is increasingly critical during the pandemic when clinical resources, and ICU resources more specifically, are being stretched to the limit.”
Last October, Palo Alto, Calif-based Vynca announced a partnership with Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare to ensure advance care planning documents are easily and reliably accessible to clinicians, patients and their caregivers across the care continuum.
Intermountain said it would be able to transform the process of advance care planning by integrating Vynca’s end-to-end solution with the health system’s existing clinical workflow and their Cerner EHR. The collaboration enables customized outreach to patients, shared decision making to digitally complete documents and ensures documents are available to clinicians, patients and their selected caregivers.
