POLST Program Is Featured in NPR Piece on End-of-Life Issues
In a recent piece regarding end-of-life issues on National Public Radio (NPR), the Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) form was featured in a conversation about a new proposal by the government to have doctors reimbursed through Medicare for conducting end-of-life conversations with their patients. Currently, Medicare pays for these kind of conversations only when it occurs during the first visit with doctors for new Medicare enrollees.
In a recent piece regarding end-of-life issues on National Public Radio (NPR), the Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) form was featured in a conversation about a new proposal by the government to have doctors reimbursed through Medicare for conducting end-of-life conversations with their patients. Currently, Medicare pays for these kind of conversations only when it occurs during the first visit with doctors for new Medicare enrollees.
Contrary to what some believe, a survey conducted by the California HealthCare Foundation found that 80 percent of Californians want to have end-of-life conversations but fewer than one in ten actually do.
"In Oregon, doctors have been squeezing end-of-life discussions into regular medical appointments for decades, under less-than-ideal circumstances. Over the past five years a quarter of a million Oregonians registered their wishes with a state registry. They use what's known as a POLST form, which stands for Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment. A version been adopted by some other states, including New York and West Virginia," according to the article.
The national POLST center is headed by Executive Director Amy Vandenbroucke, J.D., who is a Hartford Change AGEnt as well as a 2015 Practice Change Leader in Health and Aging.
To read the listen to the full article, head over to the NPR website. You can learn more about the POLST form from the POLST website as well as on our Health AGEnda blog.
