South Carolina Launch of Advance Care Planning Technology to Enhance End-of-Life Care
Staff Report From South Carolina CEO
Thursday, May 2nd, 2019
Vynca, a provider of advance care planning solutions and the South Carolina Coalition for the Care of the Seriously Ill (CSI) have collaborated to implement Vynca’s advance care planning technology to enhance end-of-life care for patients. This solution in the form of an electronic registry will allow health care providers to access this information at the point of care; thus, helping to ensure that health care decisions are honored.
Through the generous support of the BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation, CSI is providing financial support for the state’s advance care planning initiative, My Life My Choices, to assist Community Outreach Partners in the implementation of activities to improve advance care planning and to promote the use of advance care planning documentation. CSI sees the implementation of the electronic registry as a critical step to document, store and access this information regardless of the health care setting. This is not only an important milestone for My Life My Choices, but it also positions South Carolina to fully implement a statewide registry in the future.
Advance care planning documents allow people to document their future healthcare preferences should they be unable to speak for themselves. However, the lack of infrastructure to support and sustain an electronic registry can make it difficult for providers to find and access patients’ documents, especially during emergencies. Vynca’s robust platform ensures that advance care documents, including Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST) forms, truly reflect patient preferences and are quickly available electronically to health care providers where and when needed.
According to Dr. John Ropp, III, MD, FAAFP, Chairman of CSI and a board-certified Family Medicine and Hospice and Palliative Medicine clinician, “An electronic registry is essential to ensuring advance care planning documents are assessible and honored. This technology allows health care systems to seamlessly integrate with many of the electronic health record platforms to provide better care to patients and families in South Carolina.”
Vynca is the leading provider of advance care planning technology solutions, and CSI joins several other organizations throughout the United States using Vynca’s technology to electronically capture, store, and access patients’ advance care planning documents.
“Our partnership with CSI is an important step in ensuring that patient preferences are aligned with patient care in South Carolina,” said Ryan Van Wert, M.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of Vynca. “Through our collaborations with a growing number of health systems, we’re making an impact in terms of higher quality of care at the end-of-life, and avoidance of unwanted health care interventions. This speaks to the fact that patients’ wishes are being electronically documented, accessed and honored in a way that they were not previously.”
Van Wert said that Vynca has contracts with over 80 hospitals to implement and deploy its advance care planning solution, and supports digital registry services to several states across the U.S., including California, Delaware, Oregon, and Louisiana.