SHARING Choices: Lessons Learned from a Primary-Care Focused Advance Care Planning Intervention

Abstract

Background: Few advance care planning (ACP) interventions have been scaled in primary care.

Problem: Best practices for delivering ACP at scale in primary care do not exist and prior efforts have excluded older adults with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD).

Intervention: SHARING Choices (NCT#04819191) is a multicomponent cluster-randomized pragmatic trial conducted at 55 primary care practices from two care delivery systems in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. We describe the process of implementing SHARING Choices within 19 practices randomized to the intervention, summarize fidelity to planned implementation, and discuss lessons learned.

Outcomes: Embedding SHARING Choices involved engagement with organizational and clinic-level partners. Of 23,220 candidate patients, 17,931 outreach attempts by phone (77.9%) and the patient portal (22.1%) were made by ACP facilitators and 1215 conversations occurred. Most conversations (94.8%) were less than 45 minutes duration. Just 13.1% of ACP conversations included family. Patients with ADRD comprised a small proportion of patients who engaged in ACP. Implementation adaptations included transitioning to remote modalities, aligning ACP outreach with the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit, accommodating primary care practice flexibility.

Lessons learned: Study findings reinforce the value of adaptable study design; co-designing workflow adaptations with practice staff; adapting implementation processes to fit the unique needs of two health systems; and modifying efforts to meet health system goals and priorities.

Keywords: Advance care planning; advance directives; dementia; primary care; quality improvement.