Follow-up to JCAHO Survey
BWH Sets-Forth Plan to Improve Advance Care Directives
The recent completion of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) survey concluded BWH must improve its documentation of discussions about Advance Care Directives (ACD). All patient wishes must be documented in the patient’s chart.
“Advance Care Directives allows us to provide the best patient-centered care because of better knowledge of the patient and family’s wishes,” said Robert Goldszer, MD, MBA, associate chief medical officer.
In order to comply with JCAHO standards, a multidisciplinary team has worked to develop new processes. Representatives of the medical staff, nursing, care coordination, social work, admitting, health information systems, compliance office, and our ethics leaders worked to develop new processes. Members of the care team including nursing, admitting, and social work will have specific responsibilities to document the patient’s health care proxy. A new tab in in-patient charts to file advanced directives will be introduced. The ability to scan advanced directives into computerized medical records, is also being discussed.
In the past, paper educational materials were mailed to each physician at the time of his or herre-credentialing. Now, a BWH team has recently made available online education and certification about the newly defined ACD. This web-based tool is available at (http://medcomRN.com/bwhmd). Each physician should complete this education in association with their hospital credentialing. Each physician planning to admit a patient should ask that they bring a copy of their ACD to the hospital.
If you have questions or would like to work on advanced directives programs, please email (rgoldszer@partners.org)