Evolving Advance Care Planning in a Health Ecosystem: The Kaiser Permanente Experience

Advance care planning is an integral part of supporting patients through serious illness and end-of-life care.

Several components of advance care planning may be too inflexible to account for patients' changing disease and evolving goals as serious illness progresses. Health systems are starting to implement processes to address these barriers, though implementation has varied.

In 2017, Kaiser Permanente introduced Life Care Planning (LCP), incorporating advance care planning dynamically into concurrent disease management. LCP provides a framework for identifying surrogates, documenting goals, and eliciting patient values across disease progression. LCP provides standardized training to facilitate communication and utilizes a centralized section within the electronic health record for longitudinal documentation of goals.

More than 6000 physicians, nurses, and social workers have been trained in LCP. Over one million patients have engaged in LCP since its inception, with over 52% of patients age 55+ having a surrogate designated. There is evidence of high treatment concordance with patients' desired wishes (88.9%), with high rates of advance directive completion as well (84.1%).