The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
Thursday, April 8, 2021
Dear John, While advance care planning services can help patients inform providers about their future treatment preferences, new research shows that few Medicare patients actually engage in them.
Advance Care Planning Is On The Rise But Still Rare
Advance care planning is designed to help providers treat patients according to their wishes and reduce unnecessary health care and spending in their future treatment. It’s associated with improved care, lower rates of in-hospital deaths, and higher rates of hospice use.
Fee-for-service Medicare covers these conversations between patients and providers either as a stand-alone Medicare Part B service at any outpatient visit or as an optional element of an annual wellness
visit.
Makayla Palmer and coauthors studied the evolution of advance care planning, the setting of these discussions, and the demographics of participating patients.
The authors found steady growth in the number of fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries doing outpatient advance care planning between 2016 and 2019, but prevalence remained below 7.5 percent for all demographics. Their results also suggest that advance care planning conversations at and apart from annual wellness visits may play different roles.
For more on Medicare and access to care, read the April 2021 issue.
The Health Affairs Podcast Fellowship is an exciting new program for US-based applicants. The program is intended for early- or mid-early–stage career individuals with an interest in health policy and storytelling.
The program is intended to
support applicants who have an audio project in mind to inform and educate the public. Applicants should have a working knowledge of the topic and an idea of what’s needed to complete their project (interviews, data, field recordings, etc.).
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Candidates are expected to be US-based print or radio journalists, freelance storytellers, solo-preneurs, or academics. The fellowship is designed to enable fellows to work independently over a five-month period (June to October) to produce a podcast series/story of at least four episodes, which Health Affairs will publish soon after.
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