The physician services enablement company Privia Health has leveraged technology to substantially boost its advance care planning rates.
Advance care planning (ACP) has been associated with higher likelihood of hospice enrollment and lower incidence of intensive therapies, even during hospital stays, a 2019 JAMA Network study found.
Privia collaborated with the advance care planning technology company Koda Health to improve goals-of-care documentation completion rates. Among Privia’s patients, 75% who began the ACP process completed a legally valid plan. Of those, 96% designated a surrogate health care decision maker.
Using technology to streamline the ACP process was key to achieving these results, according to Dr. Keith Fernandez, Privia’s chief clinical officer,
“Technology, particularly the Koda Health offering, provides a scalable solution, taking most of the intensive work and administrative burden of Advanced Care Planning off the practice,” Fernadez told Hospice News in an email. “Most practices do not have the time needed to engage patients in discussions around end-of-life care. The sickest patients, those most in need, require the most time and benefit significantly from the engagement of the entire family, as well as friends of the family.”
Privia Health is a national physician enablement company that collaborates with over 4,500 providers across more than 1,140 practice locations to serve over 5 million patients.
ACP is under-utilized nationally, more than two-thirds (68%) of Americans indicated that discussing end-of-life preparations with their loved ones is important in a 2022 nationwide survey from life insurance provider and global technology company Ethos. However, among these individuals, less than half (47%) had goals of care conversations with their families or made end-of-life preparations, according to the survey findings.
Koda Health CEO Tatiana Fofanova founded the company in 2020 with Chief Medical Officer Dr. Desh Mohan and Katelin Cherry, the company’s chief technology officer. The three met and began collaborating at the Texas Medical Center’s (TMCi) Biodesign program, which tasked them with finding solutions to problems affecting the health system. Koda Health spun out of that work as an independent company.
The company’s platform is designed to digitize patients’ decision-making around their care preferences and goals. Koda’s advance care plans documents are legal in all 50 states and are available in multiple languages.
Privia and Koda first connected through the Texas Medical Center Innovation Center, Fernandez indicated.
“The technology provides the scale and automation needed for all patients, sick or well, to consider ACP; the high-touch, human-centered virtual aspect for the sickest patients offers a solution at a critical time in a patient’s life,” Fernandez said.
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