Increasing healthcare proxy documentation in an intensive care unit: a quality improvement initiative

Abstract

In New York State, the Health Care Proxy Law allows patients to designate a person they trust to make medical decisions on their behalf should they lose the capacity to do so. In an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) setting, identification of a health care proxy (HCP) is especially important as patients are at heightened risk of losing decision-making capacity during their clinical course. While our hospital has guidelines to solicit and correctly document the patient’s HCP information, it is not routinely done. Missing or incomplete HCP documentation is a prevalent issue, with lack of patient education, physical document issues, and time and workflow constraints commonly cited as barriers. We describe the implementation of a small-scale quality improvement project to increase the percentage of completed HCP documentation in our ICU through multi-faceted interventions targeting education, workflow, access, and technology.