UMass Memorial partners with IT firm on end-of-life care integration
Worcester-based UMass Memorial Health Care is partnering with a Minneapolis IT company to integrate patients’ end-of-life directives into its electronic medical records system, a measure that's expected to reduce costs.
The partnership was announced by Luminat, the IT firm, this week. Luminat CEO Dr. Tom Valdivia said in a statement that unwanted end-of-life care services cause “significant emotional and financial impact on patients and their families,” and will generate costs between $40 and $70 billion in the next decade.
“Advance care plans should not be viewed as a ‘nice to have.’ Not having and advance care plan should be considered a medical error,” Valdivia said.
The platform UMMHC will implement in partnership with Luminat will allow doctors to consistently document patients’ wishes, including palliative care preferences and spiritual beliefs, and identify individuals who should be involved with health care decisions regarding their loved ones. Luminat said the data is fed into the patients’ electronic medical record using cloud-based technology, making it accessible across the hospital system.
Valdivia called the platform “a first in the industry.”
“Up to this point, patients completed the advance care directive and submitted it to their physician to be filed away. As a result, the instructions weren’t accessible by all providers and were left open to interpretation from doctor to doctor,” Valdivia said.
According to Dr. David Fairchild, senior vice president at UMMHC, medical treatments provided at the end of life are at times “inconsistent” with patients’ wishes and the new platform will help solve this. Fairchild also noted that UMMHC is becoming an accountable care organization, meaning it is now tasked with providing coordinated care to Medicare patients.
“We recognized the opportunity to use Luminat technology to enable and support conversations about end of life,” Fairchild said.
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