Advance
care

July 14, 2022 -- Dr. Dan Morhaim urges caregivers not to shy away from sometimes-uncomfortable but essential conversations with patients about their values and wishes regarding treatments in their final days. Advance Care Planning documents and portable medical orders, he urges, are essential.

Today, in the authoritative journal Medical Economics, he published Why your patients need advance care plans. He writes,

We should be encouraging and assisting our patients to complete an advance directive and to make sure these forms are electronically securely stored and readily available across the healthcare continuum 24/7.

Dr. Morhaim is expert on POLSTs, MOLSTs, DNRs, Living Wills, Advance Directives, Durable Powers of Attorney, organ/tissue donation wishes, and the informatics mechanisms that make these documents accessible. His book Preparing for a Better End was published in 2020 by Johns Hopkins Press. Essential reading for anyone who expects someday to die. In other words, all of us!

Interested? Here are some recommended readings.

On Saturday, 10/29/2022 at 11:00 am PST, he will speak on this topic to our Bay Area chapter of the American Nursing Informatics Association. As informaticians, we are especially interested in learning about tools and methods to support the electronic availability of these documents. What good are documents if you can't find them when you need them? We informatics nurses can fix that.

Go Dr. Morhaim! Go informatics nurses!

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