Respecting Choices in Advance Care Planning: Here’s How Two Industry Leaders Are Working Together
The South Carolina Coalition for the Care of the Seriously Ill (CSI) has announced that they are teaming up with the leading provider of end-of-life document solutions to aid with respecting choices for advance care planning.
CSI have begun a collaboration with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Vynca to implement the company's advance care planning technology all across South Carolina. This solution in the form of an electronic registry will allow health care providers to access critical information at the point of care; thus, helping to ensure that end-of-life health care choices are known and honored.
Through the generous support of the BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation, CSI is providing financial support for the state’s advance care planning initiative, My Life My Choices, to assist Community Outreach Partners in hosting activities to improve advance care planning and to promote the use of documentation.
“Our partnership with Vynca is an important step in ensuring that patient wishes are honored throughout the health care system,” said CSI Chariman Dr. John Ropp, III, MD, FAAFP .
CSI sees the implementation of the electronic registry as a critical step to document, store and access this information regardless of the health care setting. This is not only an important milestone for My Life My Choices, but it also positions South Carolina to fully implement a statewide registry in the future.
Advance care planning documents allow people to put in writing their future healthcare preferences should they be unable to speak for themselves. However, the lack of infrastructure to support and sustain an electronic registry can make it difficult for providers to find and access patients’ documents, especially during emergencies.
Vynca’s robust platform ensures that advance care documents, including Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST) forms, truly reflect patient preferences and are quickly available electronically to health care providers where and when needed.
Dr. Ropp, a board-certified Family Medicine and Hospice and Palliative Medicine clinician, added, “An electronic registry is essential to ensuring advance care planning documents are accessible and honored. This technology allows health care systems to seamlessly integrate with many of the electronic health record platforms to provide better care to patients and families in South Carolina.”
Vynca is the leading provider of advance care planning technology solutions, and CSI joins several other organizations throughout the United States using Vynca’s technology to electronically capture, store, and access patients’ advance care planning documents.
“Through our collaborations with a growing number of health systems, we’re making an impact in terms of higher quality of care at the end-of-life, and avoidance of unwanted health care interventions," said Ryan Van Wert, M.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of Vynca. "This speaks to the fact that patients’ wishes are being electronically documented, accessed and honored in a way that they were not previously.”
Van Wert said that Vyncahas contracts with over 80 hospitals to implement and deploy its advance careplanning solution, and supports digital registry services to several statesacross the U.S., including California, Delaware, Oregon, and Louisiana.
You can find more information about advance care planning at www.mylifemychoices.org. This interactive website providers numerous resources to help support individuals as well as health care providers in having meaningful conversations about health care wishes and documenting those wishes in an advance directive that can be shared with health care providers via the electronic registry.
For more information please contact Teeshla Curtis, Program Manager, My Life My Choices at info@mylifemychoices.org or Emeila Altschul, Director of Commercial Marketing, Vynca Health at emelia@vyncahealth.com.
About South CarolinaCoalition for the Care of the Seriously Ill
Founded in 2010, South Carolina Coalition for the Care of theSeriously Ill (SC CSI) is a statewide coalition that brings key organizations, clinicians, and healthcare entities together to collaboratively redesign care, improve quality of life, and protect the ethical rights ofthe seriously, chronically, or terminally ill in South Carolina. Its mission is to ensure all persons in SC with serious, chronic, or terminal illnesses willhave an active voice in the care decision process.
The coalition is committed to improving the shared decision-makingfor this population by implementing strategies which help patients understandthe typical trajectory of their condition and take an active role in their treatment,including decisions about their care. Charter members include: SouthCarolina Medical Association, South Carolina Hospital Association, SouthCarolina Nurses Association, The Carolinas Center for Hospice and End-of-LifeCare, South Carolina Healthcare Ethics Network, South Carolina Society ofChaplains, Sharing Hope SC, and AARP South Carolina.
About the BlueCross BlueShield of South CarolinaFoundation
The BlueCross BlueShieldof South Carolina Foundation is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross BlueShield Association.
About Vynca
Vynca, based in Palo Alto, Calif., provides comprehensive advance care planning technology solutions that enable health care organizations to deliver high-quality end-of-life care consistent with an individual’s preferences. The company helps patients, families and health care providers have meaningful conversations about future care preferences, ensure that wishes are documented accurately, and provides real-time access to this critical information throughout the care continuum.
Vynca is also the leading solution provider for state advance care planning registries, having first partnered with the Oregon POLST Registry to develop a bi-directional electronic interface for health care organizations in Oregon. It is also the technology vendor for the California POLST eRegistry Pilot, the Delaware DMOST Registry, and the Louisiana LaPOST Registry. For more information, visit www.vyncahealth.com. Follow Vynca on LinkedIn and Twitter @VyncaHealth.