Stanford Medicine Serious Illness Care Program


In an effort to promote timely, high quality advance care planning conversations with patients, in January 2018, Stanford’s Department of Medicine joined a health system collaborative led by Ariadne Labs to implement a Serious Illness Care Program throughout our divisions. Our current implementation partners include Hospital Medicine, Oncology, Emergency Medicine, Palliative Medicine. Our team would like to assist other DOM Divisions and clinical Departments in the School of Medicine in implementing this program.

About the Program

The Serious Illness Care Program is an advance care planning initiative developed by Atul Gawande, Susan Block, and his partners at Ariadne Labs. The lab, a joint center between Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, develops scalable health care solutions to deliver better care at critical moments in peoples lives – in addition to the Serious Illness Care Program, some of these solutions include the Better Birth initiative and the world-renowned WHO Safe Surgery Checklist.   

At Stanford, the program is led by Winnie Teuteberg, MD, Clinical Associate Professor, Section of Palliative Care. Her team consists of a Project Manager, Program Coordinator, 2 Assistant Clinical Directors, and 12 certified Clinician Serious Illness Conversation Guide Trainers.  

Implementation of the Serious Illness Care Program consists of:

Workflow Redesign

to accommodate conversations with seriously ill patients

Clinician Training

on using the Serious Illness Conversation Guide in clinical practice

Implementation Follow-up & Coaching

 to ensure sustainability

Data Reporting

via progress reports developed by DOM Analytics team 

Results

To date, the program has trained over 400 clinicians from many different disciplines including physicians, advance practice providers, nurses, social workers and chaplains.  Over 1,300 Serious Illness Conversations have been documented in our system.

For more information contact Dr. Teuteberg at winnie.teuteberg@stanford.edu, or visit our website at http://med.stanford.edu/advancecareplanning.html.