Thursday, December 14, 2023

Welcome and Keynote: Quality: What is it Good For?

The foundational principles of palliative care are to relieve suffering and improve quality of life for people living with serious illness and for their loved ones. How do we know if we are actually achieving these goals? This session will focus on the why of quality measurement and its role in ensuring the highest quality of care for our patients and their loved ones.

Diane E. Meier, MD, Director Emeritus and Strategic Advisor, Center to Advance Palliative Care and Professor, Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Icahan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Educational Session 1: Panel on Perspectives of Health Equity

The PCQC is dedicated to improving palliative care through the collection, analysis, and timely reporting of actionable data. Its objective is to improve healthcare by defining and promoting quality in palliative care. Quality care is equitable care. In addition, ensuring high-quality palliative care services and measuring program impact to demonstrate value, attention to inequalities is required.

This session addresses health equity as a driver for quality care. The panelist of subject matter experts will discuss health disparities across various racial, ethnic and cultural groups and patient populations, identify areas for improvement in serious illness care and make recommendations for (or promote) best practices for high quality palliative care for historically marginalized managing serious illness.

Karen Bullock PhD, LICSW, FGSA, APHSW-C, Louise McMahon Ahearn Endowed Professor in the Boston College School of Social Work and in Global Public Health

Carey Candrian, PhD, Associate Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Colorado

Khaliah Johnson, MD, Division Chief, Pediatric Palliative Care; Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine; and Attending Physician, Grady Ponce de Leon Center

Educational Session 2: Palliative Care for Parkinson’s Disease

In this session we will review the evidence that people living with Parkinson’s and their families have significant palliative care needs that are often not met under current standards of care. We will review evidence supporting palliative approaches to improve patient and family-centered outcomes and areas where additional collaborations with neurology or neuro-specific approaches may help palliative care teams. Lastly, we will discuss efforts to challenge systems and change culture to improve care.

Benzi Kluger, MD, Professor of Neurology and Medicine and the Director Palliative Care Research Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center

Educational Session 3: The State of the Our Field

In this overview of the structural and operational data of palliative care programs collected during the 2022 PCQC Annual Program Survey, we will review how palliative care programs operate across the country. We will also review staffing models of palliative care teams and identify how the PCQC Registry can be utilized to identify areas of growth and opportunity for the field.

Fred Friedman, Registry Manager, Palliative Care Quality Collaborative
Steve Pantilat, MD, MHM, FACP, FAAHPM, Kates-Burnard and Hellman Distinguished Professor in Palliative Care and the Chief of the Division of Palliative Medicine, University of California San Francisco

Educational Session 4: Palliative Care Outcomes Collaborative

The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaborative (PCOC) is a national voluntary program that is improving the quality and outcomes of palliative care in Australia. During this session, PCQC welcomes PCOC to share best practices of high-quality palliative care learned within their Australian-based collaborative. Participants will learn about the PCOC suite of measures and reports to inform quality improvement benchmarking as well as be able to describe how the PCOC model can help improve equity in palliative care outcomes.

Barbara Daveson, PhD, Associate Professor, Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC), Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health, University of Wollongong, Australia

Friday, December 15, 2023

Welcome and Showcase Panel: State-of-the-Art Methods for Electronic Clinical Quality Measures for Palliative Care

With the increasing use of electronic health records over the past decade, electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) are increasingly used in quality measurement and accountability programs to promote high quality care. Many key palliative care quality measures that use the electronic health record (EHR) evaluate complex topics such as goals of care conversations or symptom management. Until recently, utilizing text-based data required to evaluate these complex topics necessitated manual chart abstraction, which is extremely cumbersome, expensive, and not scalable to the population level. We will discuss approaches to identifying the population of interest to study, otherwise known as the denominator or an electronic health record (EHR) phenotype. We will also discuss how Natural language processing (NLP) presents an opportunity to identify text-based data within EHRs with increased speed and efficiency compared to manual chart review. In this session, we aim to review state-of-the art scalable methodologic approaches to implementing eCQMs within health systems to promote novel research and quality improvement efforts and support a learning health system.

Prasanna Ananth, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine; and Faculty Member, Yale Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy and Effectiveness Research Center
Charlotta Lindvall, MD, PhD, Director of Clinical Informatics, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Principal Investigator, Computational Palliative Care Research Lab, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Anne Walling, MD, PhD, FAAHPM, Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research at University of California, Los Angeles

Moderator
Angelo Volandes, MD, MPH, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Co-Founder, ACP Decisions Nonprofit Foundation 

Educational Session 5: PCQC Clinical Data Review: Learning from PCQC’s Clinical Quality Data

During this session, we will provide you with an overview of telehealth in outpatient palliative care. Participants will be guided through a comprehensive review of PCQC’s clinical quality data, shedding light on the landscape and significance of telehealth while addressing disparities in access and utilization. We will review how we have gained valuable insights into how PCQC clinical quality data can be harnessed to examine clinical outcomes and disparities associated with telehealth.

Sarah Nouri, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor and Associate Chief for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Division of Palliative Medicine, University of California San Francisco

Educational Session 6: Clinician Wellness and Palliative Care

Join us for an insightful session where we delve into the critical intersection of healthcare, palliative care, and the well-being of those who provide these essential services. This session will equip participants with a comprehensive understanding of workplace wellness and the unique challenges faced by clinicians in palliative care. Through a focus on national models, we will explore practical strategies for addressing burnout and fostering organizational compassion for palliative care clinicians.

Rachel Thienprayoon, MD, MSCS, Chief Clinical Wellness Officer and an Associate Professor of Anesthesia and Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

Educational Session 7: Quality and Research: Better Together

Understanding the evolving landscape is paramount for palliative care professionals. During this session, participants will learn to describe the need for quality and research in palliative care. Additionally, we’ll explore the intersection of quality and research in clinical care and discovery. Participants will be engaged in a discussion that explores the opportunities to leverage quality efforts and optimize collaboration moving forward between the PCQC Registry, the Collaborative, and research networks in order to conduct evidence-based care.

Christine Seel Ritchie, MD, MSPH, Kenneth L. Minaker, MD Endowed Chair in Geriatric Medicine; Research Director, Division of Palliative Care and Geriatric Medicine; Director, Center for Aging and Serious Illness, Mongan Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School