This article is about collecting the "Comfort care" (ACP C, Palliative care) temp entry. Collection has stopped, see Palliative care for a related thing we collect.
Data Use and Purpose
Which patients qualify
The purpose is to specifically identify and tag only those ICU and Medicine patients for whom the initial goal of care right from the start of a unit admission is comfort care, ACP C, palliation.
Pts for whom comfort care is ordered after admission do not qualify.
Pt does not require but could be receiving Palliative Service.
Pt could be receiving some medical treatments like treating an pneumonia or infection, pain, dehydration and anything else that would ease suffering.
Select Comfort Care only if any of the following are true:
- (a) the patient had an ACP-C prior to admission to that unit/ward
- (b) the patient had an ACP-C order implemented as part of the admission orders to that unit/ward
- (c) the initial admission note of the unit/ward attending physician and/or the H&P written by the house officer identifies that the patient was admitted for any of:
- (i) comfort care,
- (ii) palliation
- (iii) palliative care
- (iv) or end-of-life care
- Note that none of items (ii)-(iv) require that the patient was ACP-C or that the Palliative Care Service be involved in care.
Coding Instructions
If the patient meets the above criteria then code as:
- In CCMDB.accdb TMP tab add:
- PROJECT: Comfort Care
- ITEM: Comfort Care
- Checkbox, dates, numbers: Don't need to fill, not used for this project
Start and stop date
- Start Date: 2013-Nov-11
- Stop Date: none
Data use / Reporting and Analysis
The data is used to exclude patients from analysis for Project Overstay.
The data is used to exclude patients in the analysis of the ALERT Scale in the Quarterly report and Annual report.