Dr. Torke: Standardizing goals of care enhances patient care

Transcript:

The reason why developing a specific note focusing on goals of care was important is that up to now, we’ve mostly been embedding our information about goals of care into our daily chart notes. And the problem is hundreds of chart notes are written particularly when a patient is in the hospital. But even if a patient has multiple specialists, everybody is writing notes in the chart all the time. But you can imagine if a patient comes in and the doctor wants to know, “What are those goals of care?” It has to be someplace that’s easy to find.

So, we created a specific note to address goals of care so that everybody would know exactly where to look for it. So, even myself as a primary care provider, there might be 20 or 30 notes written by other palliative care providers, and I don’t know where the documentation is for that important goals of care conversation. Now that we have a goals of care note, I know exactly where to look. It’s filed along with the advance directives in a special tab and so, any clinician who’s interested in knowing, “Has this patient had an in-depth conversation about goals of care,” can look for this particular type of note.