Advance Care Planning Collaboration Project Created

AVON, Ohio - Oct. 6, 2015 - PRLog -- Directed (http://www.comsllc.com/) Medical Systems (also known as ""DMS"), the leading innovator of advance care planning solutions, announced today the creation of an innovative approach to get collaboration across the entire healthcare community to improve the advance care planning process.  Simply named the “uACP Project,” the objective is to get a variety of healthcare participants, including providers, payors, EMRs to work together and create a universal advance care planning (uACP) solution.

Public concerns over an individual’s right to determine their own health care led to state legislative efforts to encourage the use of advance directives.  Similar federal efforts resulted in what is commonly referred to as the Patient Self Determination Act (PSDA), requires six types of Medicare and Medicaid funded providers—hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, home health agencies HHAs, health maintenance organizations, and Medicare Advantage MA organizations to maintain written policies and procedures to inform those they serve about advance directives, and document information about individuals’ advance directives in the medical record.

In order to rapidly develop a state of the art uACP process, it is apparent that all Medicare funded providers, and the payors, and the EMRs are needed to be part of the project.  After studying the ACP process, every healthcare IT provider will benefit from a uACP and national registry versus the alternative of everyone spending time and money trying to solve the same problem.  The payor’s interest is simple – the ability to provide their members with whatever level of care they desire, “from do everything” to “don’t do too much.”   Another bonus, the USA can save around $100B per year that is spent on aggressive end of life care that people do not want.

John M. Cachat, the visionary behind the uACP Project, has done this type of collaborative effort in the past.  Back in the late 1980’s, Cachat lead a similar project to create an integrated quality management system for manufacturing companies, by creating a cooperative that had 200 companies invest $4,500 to participate.  In the early 1990’s, Cachat did it again with a group of 10 companies investing around $250,000 for another development project.

“There are a lot of organizations that want to participate and want to be part of the group that creates a significantly better solution to improve the advance care planning process,” stated Cachat.  “However, due to budget constraints and, in some cases, concerns about participating in a “death panel” project, makes the collaborative environment of the uACP Project a perfect solution.  I have done this before and all the participants have been 100% satisfied 100% of the time.”

The uACP Project timeline is six months, and although that may seem aggressive, Cachat also has a proven track record of developing major software systems in months using agile software development approaches.

Two 30 Minute Executive Briefing have been scheduled to provide more information on this exciting project – click here to register - https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/5242944600935545345- onTues Oct 13 or Thurs Oct 15 @ 2:30 Eastern.