Background: Advance care planning can be challenging for both patients and providers.  Barriers to understanding patients’ goals of care include patient and provider discomfort with the topic, as well as family and cultural dynamics.  The Stanford Letter Advance Directive (LAD) is a simple tool written at a fifth grade reading level in eight different languages [...]

Background: Advance care planning can be challenging for both patients and providers.  Barriers to understanding patients’ goals of care include patient and provider discomfort with the topic, as well as family and cultural dynamics.  The Stanford Letter Advance Directive (LAD) is a simple tool written at a fifth grade reading level in eight different languages [...]

Background: Substantial portions of hospitalized patients in the United States do not understand their plan of care. Hospitalized patients’ knowledge of their plan of care affects their ability to provide truly informed consent and assent to inpatient treatment, and to assume their medical care after discharge. There is a need for further study of the [...]

Background: Advance care planning is nationally recognized as important for honoring patient wishes at the end of life. Despite this widespread recognition, many patients lack advance care planning and spend their last days in ways not concordant with their values. Moreover, traditional advance directives may provide only a partial context for patients’ belief systems relevant [...]

Background: The UCLA Department of Medicine (DOM) Rapid Mortality Review (RMR) is an innovative in-person, near real-time review of all deaths to capture the unique insight of the care providers into aspects of end-of-life care quality that otherwise go undocumented and unreported. The purpose of this study is to examine characteristics of mortality cases that [...]