How we know if we're succeeding

Measuring ourselves: advance care planning

The basic facts

• Advance care planning means thinking about, talking about, and making a plan for your wishes to be carried out if you become unable to make your own health care decisions.
• Most people have thought about what treatment they would want if they became very ill and could not make decisions for themselves. But often these wishes have not been shared with family or doctors.
• Most people have not put their wishes in writing, which means they could end up receiving treatments or procedures they would not want.
• All 50 states have statutory forms (Living Will or Power of Attorney for Health Care) recognized as legal tools for documenting a patient's wishes. Yet fewer than 20% of adults have completed one of these forms.

Our mission is to help more people discuss and record their health care wishes, through completion of an advance directive (a legal document such as the Power of Attorney for Health Care). We want the people we serve to know their options, have their questions answered and receive any help they need in the process.

We measure the average number of newly filed advance directives for patients of our family practice and internal medicine doctors.

In 2006, our goal was to achieve an average of 24 or more newly filed advance directives per doctor. We exceeded that goal by achieving an average of 32.7.

For more information and helpful resources on advance care planning (including the Power of Attorney for Health Care form), click here.