News

Our Executive Director, Anna Gosline, is participating in the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) Policy Forum on May 12, 2021. The forum offers changemakers an insider-view of federal serious illness care policies that they can leverage to drive change in their communities.

We’re excited to announce that Massachusetts is building a state electronic registry to allow clinicians timely and trusted access to the medical forms that document patients' preferences for care near the end of life. The registry will include forms called physician orders for life-sustaining treatment, or POLST.

The Coalition is proud to be partnering with the Massachusetts Association of Colleges of Nursing (MACN) to help ensure nursing students receive the necessary educational foundation to provide compassionate, evidence-based palliative care over the course of serious illness and through the end-of-life. Through this unique partnership, MACN has endorsed the CARES and G-CARES competencies.

Join Coalition working group member Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, MD, MDiv for what's sure to be an extraordinary conversation hosted by Diva Docs Boston, a professional organization of Black Women Physicians in Massachusetts led by Philomena Asante MD, MPH. It's on Wednesday, March 31st at 7pm Eastern.

Massachusetts is building a state electronic registry to allow clinicians timely and trusted access to the medical forms that document patients' preferences for care near the end of life, thanks to contributions from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Coalition for Serious Illness Care.

"This electronic registry – a trusted, single source of truth - is a critical part of ensuring that everyone in Massachusetts receives care that supports their priorities," said Andrew Dreyfus, president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and founding member of the Massachusetts Coalition for Serious Illness Care. "Far too often, people don't get the care they want. It was clear there was a huge opportunity to improve this part of the health care infrastructure so that clinicians all over the state can quickly access patients' documented preferences for their care when it matters most."

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine (NASEM)'s Roundtable on Quality Care for People with Serious Illness hosted a webinar in late January on “Serious Illness Care, Structural Racism, and Health Disparities in the Era of COVID-19”.

Just published in JAMA Psychiatry, Maninder K. Kahlon and colleagues conducted a randomized clinical trial to see if empathetic conversations by telephone could reduce loneliness, depression, and anxiety in at-risk older adults. The answer? A resounding yes.

The Coalition has embarked on an ambitious four-phase consumer research project that centers on equity using participatory design methods. The goal is to identify new messaging, communications, as well as meaningful community and/or clinical strategies to improve serious illness care experiences of at-risk populations. Read more about each phase, and our findings from starting with the community.

In this issue:

• Movement at our medical schools
• Join the Massachusetts Caregiver Coalition
• In case you missed it in our Twitter feed...

The Coalition’s 2018 consumer research found that just 13% of Massachusetts adults report having a conversation with their doctor about the kind of end-of-life care they wanted. Part of the problem may be that the topic of death is just so hard to talk about, for both the patient and the doctor. “One of the things we hear really commonly is that people just don’t have a good understanding of what the road ahead looks like when they’re very sick,” said Anna Gosline, the Coalition’s director. “And so when you don’t have a really good understanding of what your prognosis is and what’s going to happen to you, it’s really difficult to know what to do or not do…”