Kei Ouchi
Discipline: Physician
Funding awarded to: Brigham and Women’s Hospital
An advance care planning intervention in the emergency department
ED GOAL is a 6-minute motivational interview conducted in the emergency department (ED), which engages seriously ill yet clinically stable older adults to address advance care planning (ACP) with their outpatient clinician(s) and avoids a time-consuming, sensitive conversation in the time-pressured ED environment. My prior research established that ED GOAL may increase patients’ engagement in ACP yet identified opportunities for refinement: These include broadening the reach by adapting its use by specialized nurses and adding care coordination components (hand-off document, etc.) to the outpatient clinicians. This study will allow me to refine ED GOAL to maximize its potential efficacy and scalability.
“An emergency department (ED) visit represents an important time and place to empower older adults with serious illness to formulate their goals for future medical care. However, too few specialty palliative care clinicians are available to conduct high quality ACP conversations in the ED. Therefore, there is a need for a scalable method to improve primary palliative care skills for ED clinicians so that they can capture this untapped opportunity to introduce or re-initiate ACP conversations with patients in the ED. The Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program would provide me with an unmatched opportunity to prepare me to become an independent investigator and a leader in ED-based palliative care research. Furthermore, the Program would cultivate my leadership skills and expand my collegial network to disseminate my findings broadly.”