What You Should Know:
– Intermountain Healthcare collaborates with Vynca, a national leader in advance care planning solutions to prioritize and digitize advance care planning.
– The collaboration enables integrated digital completion workflows and establishes a single, centralized source of truth with built-in error prevention – enabling the Intermountain Healthcare team to honor patients’ end-of-life wishes, avoid unwanted healthcare utilization and reduce trauma for families, caregivers and clinicians when faced with hard decisions in a medical crisis.
Vynca, a national leader in advance care planning solutions, today announced a partnership with Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system, to ensure advance care planning documents are easily and reliably accessible to clinicians, patients and their caregivers across the care continuum. The collaboration enables integrated digital completion workflows and establishes a single, centralized source of truth with built-in error prevention – enabling the Intermountain Healthcare team to honor patients’ end-of-life wishes, avoid unwanted healthcare utilization and reduce trauma for families, caregivers and clinicians when faced with hard decisions in a medical crisis.
Why It Matters
Intermountain has been at the leading edge of healthcare systems identifying evidence-based innovations to achieve the Triple Aim – improving experience of care, health of populations and reducing per capita costs. As such, they recognized that improving end-of-life care quality and reducing unwanted healthcare interventions required a new solution with the digital data capabilities to define and track success. Intermountain is able to transform the process of advance care planning by integrating Vynca’s end-to-end solution with the health system’s existing clinical workflow and their Cerner electronic health record (EHR), who is also a Vynca partner. The collaboration enables customized outreach to patients, shared decision making to digitally complete documents and ensures documents are available to clinicians, patients and their selected caregivers.
“We are grateful to collaborate with an innovative health system like Intermountain to support providers and patients through the advance care planning process,” said Ryan Van Wert, MD, CEO and co-founder, Vynca. “Vynca’s solutions and services are designed to guide and empower individuals and providers to engage in these important conversations. Through shared decision making and document accessibility, patients can feel confident that their care preferences will be known across the care continuum.”
Integration with Cerner EHR
A lack of clarity in patient wishes, combined with concerns over document accuracy and integrity and breakdowns in transitions of care have historically led to low clinical confidence in advance care planning documents, as well as patient safety concerns and unwanted healthcare utilization. By integrating Vynca’s digital technology solutions throughout the entire system, Intermountain gains the ability to increase advance care planning conversations and documentation, access forms at the point of care, decrease hospital mortality and readmission rates and improve patient and family care satisfaction.
“Vynca’s software solution provides an effective digital storage and retrieval system for advance care planning documents that integrates into our Cerner EHR,” said Mary Helen Stricklin, MSN, RNC, Intermountain’s system nursing director for palliative care. “Caregivers at various points of care are able to quickly glance to see if a patient has stated preferences for end-of-life care or life-support, so they can know, share and honor those preferences. The Vynca software also allows caregivers to complete electronic Provider Order of Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) forms stating end-of-life wishes. Vynca provides for these forms to be signed electronically by the patient and provider with an immediate availability in their medical record. If patient wishes change, new documents are easy to create, and previous documents can also be viewed in their record.”
Intermountain receives business intelligence and reporting information on when, where and if advance care forms were accessed at the point of care before critical clinical decisions were made – delivering insights into utilization, success and value from implementing a digitized advance care planning program. Vynca enables providers and patients to not just view documents, but also continue discussions across all care settings.
