Massachusetts' Efforts to Improve Health Care Include Focus on End-of-Life

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council recently released its annual report. Along with goals to improve treatment of chronic illness, decrease hospital infection rates, improve quality reporting and reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health care, the Council also set a FY 2008 focus on end-of-life care.

Develop processes and measures to improve adherence to patients’ wishes in providing care at the end of life. Ensure that health care providers ask about and follow patients’ wishes with respect to invasive treatments, do not resuscitate orders, hospice and palliative care, and other treatments at the end of life.

The Council set out nine strategies to achieve these goals, including: a statewide public health education campaign; development of something similar to POLST (Physician Order for Life Sustaining Treatment) orders; require hospitals, extended care facilities, and home health organization to offer formal hospice and palliative care programs; measures insure physician and nurse competency in end-of-life care. You can also read a summary of the report by JudyAnn Bigby, M.D., Health and Human Services Secretary and chair of the Council.