Engaging new media to drive advance care planning.

Abstract

153 Background: Though Congress enacted the Patient Self-Determination Act in 1991, only 18-36% of Americans have completed an advance directive. Less than half of severely ill patients had an advance directive in their medical record, only one in three with a chronic illness completed an advance directive, and studies suggest that two-thirds of physicians whose patients had advance directives were unaware of the existence of the documents. The Act required healthcare facilities to provide written information on rights to make treatment decisions and to make information available to patients who did not have an advance directive. There was a mandate directing HHS to conduct an awareness campaign about advance directives. The low acceptance of the directives demonstrates a failure to educate patients about their rights. Hypothesis: A patient-centered approach to end of life issues will generate better communication and result in greater acceptance of advance directives- achieving the goals of the Patient Self-Determination Act. Methods: A survey of 196 people showed that 67.7% felt that end of life issues were not covered enough in the media. We created a Newswire using WordPress and posted an average of three news stories weekly on topics pertaining to end of life. Posts were generated from existing media coverage and original reporting. The topics included culture, society, politics, healthcare, caregiving, law, advance care planning, hospice, and palliative care services. We tracked the number of views, the most viewed reports, monthly traffic and referral sources. We established Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts. We tracked followers, likes, re-tweets, pins, and shares. Results: From 8/2012 through 2/2013, the number of views increased from 566 to 2,452 with a peak of 3,809 in 11/2012. The most viewed day was 11/7/2012, the day following Election Day. The most viewed reports to date have been “Caregiver Discrimination Against LGBT Seniors,” “Psychedelic Drugs at the End of Life,” and “POLST Moving Forward in Illinois.” The referral sources in descending order are Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo. Conclusions: We demonstrated that there is an interest in patient-centered topics pertaining to the end of life and that social media drives interest, education and conversation.