UMass Memorial to Incorporate End-of-Life Directives Into EMR
The Worcester-based UMass Memorial Health Care and Lumināt, a St. Louis Park, Minn.-based advance care planning solutions company, have partnered to fully integrate patients’ end-of-life directives into their electronic medical records (EMRs).
This partnership will equip all UMass Memorial providers to access, understand and implement patients’ wishes, with the goal of reducing the cost of care at end of life while improving care quality and satisfaction of patients and their families, officials say.
The partnership will enable physicians to consistently document the end-of-life wishes from patients – from palliative care preferences and specific spiritual beliefs, to identifying the individuals who should be involved and informed in the decision-making process. The data is then fed into the patient’s EMR via cloud-based technology, giving the entire provider system the same information and instructions, and helping family members understand the patient’s end-of-life preferences.
“Unless communicated in advance, many medical treatments provided at the end of life are inconsistent with patients’ wishes,” David Fairchild, M.D., senior vice president of clinical integration at UMass Memorial, said in a statement. “As UMass Memorial transitions to being an accountable care organization, we recognized the opportunity to use Lumināt technology to enable and support conversations about end of life.”
