Do The Hospital Doctors See Your Advance Directives?

Of late it seems to me that we have seen a lot of articles dealing with issues regarding end of life wishes.   The New York Times ran an article in late March about doctors actually seeing a patient’s advance directive.  You’ve Detailed Your Last Wishes, but Doctors May Not See Them is written by a doctor who summarizes first-hand experiences in a hospital with one patient in the ER who “had done everything we could have asked. He’d been brave enough to talk with his doctors about his cancer and acknowledge that time was short. He had designated a health care proxy. But there he was, surrounded by strangers, the intubation he never would have wanted looming and the record of that conversation buried in his electronic record.” 

Here’s how the doctor described the problem, as “not about individuals, but instead about a system that doesn’t sufficiently protect patients from getting care they do not want.”  The issue it seems is documenting the info or the ability to retrieve the info in the chart.

This doctor “delved into the unexpectedly interesting world of advance care planning and electronic health records, interviewing clinicians with on-the-ground experience recording and retrieving these conversations and representatives from the companies behind some of the most widely used electronic records.”  The stories shared are quite interesting and highlights the issues that arise without a national standard.

Here are some suggestions the author included in the article:

What could really make a meaningful difference, I heard time and time again, is standards for sharing, or “interoperability” across all electronic records that would benefit every patient, everywhere. At least, all related advance care planning documentation should be in one place in the medical record and accessible with one simple click of the mouse. Beyond that, maybe all health systems could require identification of a health care proxy for all patients, so we would know who should make decisions if the patient can’t. Maybe patients should be able to access their health records through a patient-facing interface, send in their own directives, or even update related notes. Ideally, the electronic record isn’t just a clunky online version of a paper chart but actually a tool to help us do our jobs better.