Today is National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD), "a day devoted to encouraging the completion of advance directives." When discussing end-of-life care, it's a delicate issue that has to be handled carefully - and one in which mHealth can play an important role.
"There are serious communication challenges around advance care planning and they contribute to the emotional and financial burdens on patients, their families and their caretakers," Geri Lynn Baumblatt, executive director of patient engagement for Emmi Solutions, said in a press release. "Empowering people to make decisions about their own care before reaching a point where they can no longer speak for themselves can shift that experience from one of stress and confusion to one where everyone involved including the family and care team is readily prepared to follow the person's wishes."
"In a study of ICU patients with terminal conditions, only 12 percent of patients with an advance directive had received input from their physician in its development while another study showed that between 65 and 76 percent of physicians whose patients had an advance directive were not aware that it existed," Nathan Kottkamp, founder of NHDD, in the release. "These findings show that there is a huge communication gap between patients and their doctors around end of life care, NHDD's mission is to help close that gap while Emmi Solutions' program is a useful tool for doing so."
For a closer look at how mHealth figures into advance directives, take a look at this infographic from Emmi Solutions.
Click image to enlarge.
