UMass Memorial Health Care partners with Honoring Choices Massachusetts

October 8, 2017

We are thrilled to welcome UMass Memorial Health Care to the statewide Honoring Choices Community Partner Network.  UMass Memorial Health Care is the largest health care system in Central Massachusetts and includes 4 hospitals: UMass Memorial Medical Center (Worcester); HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital (Clinton, Burbank and Leominster), and Marlborough Hospital.  UMass Memorial Health Care is the clinical partner of UMass Medical School.

“Our new partnership with Honoring Choices Massachusetts will give us high-quality tools and training to better engage our diverse community in advance care planning”, says Jennifer Reidy, MD, MS, FAAHPM, Chief, Division of Palliative Care, UMass Memorial Medical Center, “and improve the care we give to our sickest and most vulnerable patients.”

We begin our partnership by supporting many of UMass Memorial’s well established programs, with a shared mission to inform and empower adults and families to make a personal health care plan and receive the best possible person-directed care throughout their lives. Honoring Choices will provide our structured approach to health care planning and proven programs to support the following  programs:

  • ACO Provider Education: Inform all care providers and staff with up-to-date Massachusetts based educational materials and planning tools;
  • Care Management Team: Provide the “Who’s Your Agent?” Workshop for Care Providers to the care management team to enhance their health care planning knowledge and sharpen communication skills. The team will incorporate the programs and tools into their  work with over 600 patients, and measure patient engagement in areas of heart failure, COPD and end-stage renal failure;
  • Medical Interpreters Program: Expand multi-cultural and multi-lingual connections in the community using the Honoring Choices 9 translated Health Care Proxys and multi-lingual videos,  and promote access to medical interpreters services;
  • Palliative Care Medicine and Community Programs: Support Jennifer Reidy, MD, Chief, Division of Palliative Care Medicine, UMass Memorial Medical Center and the Palliative Care Team, and support Sarah McGee, MD and the Shrewsbury Nursing Homes Program;
  •  Serious Illness Communication Program: Offer tools and programs to the four medical school goals-of-care curriculum project to train all medical students in serious illness communication;
  • MOLST Initiatives: To build on the progress of Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (MOLST) initiative started in Worcester, by participating in  two “MOLST: Meeting the Challenge” Workshops. Jennifer Reidy, MD, is a expert panelist for the October 18, 2017 MOLST Workshop for all providers in Central Massachusetts. On November 15, 2017 , Honoring Choices and UMass will be co-hosting a  MOLST workshop for all UMass care providers.

To learn more, contact with Jennifer Reidy, MD, Chief, Palliative Care  at UMass Medical Center.