2017 YEAR-IN-REVIEW: Thank you Honoring Choices Partners & Friends!

February 7, 2018

What a year!  Our wholehearted thanks to the thousands of Honoring Choices Partners and Friends using our proven programs and planning tools to help adults in their community. Your collaborative work is making a significant impact to improve health outcomes and person-directed care for all adults in the Commonwealth.

Honoring Choices Massachusetts (HCM) is a consumer oriented non-profit whose goal is to  provide every adult in the Commonwealth with information and tools to direct their health care choices and to choose care consistent with their goals and values. HCM offers a structured approach to health care planning, and provides consumers and care providers with same language and tools to foster planning discussions as the mechanism to lifelong person-directed care.

The information and tools are dispensed, and consumers reached, through the Community and Alliance Partners who have incorporated HCM’s proven programs into their organizations. HCM’s training workshops & tools have been provided to thousands of interdisciplinary care providers, thereby reaching the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable and underserved adults & families in their own community.

HCM’s Who’s Your Agent? Tool Kits, including the Health Care Proxy and Personal Directive, have become the go-to industry standard. Our Partners have taken the lead across 6 regions statewide to proactively address social determinants and barriers to care that closely track to equity gaps, while creating new pathways to improve access to essential care & services.

In collaboration with our Partners HCM has:

  1. engaged 35,200 adults in new health care planning discussions to date;
  2. initiated My Voice, My Choice to access multilingual, multicultural videos and downloadable planning documents in 9 languages;
  3. launched the Health Care Planning Ambassador Program to empower consumers to start peer-to-peer discussions to help adults make a plan where they live, work & gather;
  4. hosted 9 “MOLST: Meeting the Challenge Workshops” across the Commonwealth, attended by over 450 interdisciplinary care providers, to build a MOLST process that is responsive the changing health needs and choices of adults on a serious illness journey.
  5. launched a study, "Engaging Key Stakeholders To Improve the MOLST Process.” Susan DeSanto-Madeya, PhD, RN, Assoc. Clinical Professor, Boston College, Wm. F. Connell School of Nursing and her team are analyzing 358 comprehensive surveys from the 9 MOLST Workshops to determine common themes and next step solutions.
  6. created “EMS & MOLST: 5 Things To Do In Advance of an Emergency”, a new guide in collaboration with the 5 MA EMS Regional Directors to help ensure MOLST forms valid, visible and honored.
  7. teamed up to record Ariadne Labs - HCM Joint Webinar: "More, Earlier, Better Conversations to Improve Serious Illness Care."
  8. partnered with Cake for on-line creation, sharing & storage of the HCM Health Care Proxy and Personal Directive;
  9. launched Palliative Care Initiative working with hundreds of palliative care providers to create a common language & set of tools for effective patient-care provider discussions;
  10. conducting a year-long study, “The Effectiveness of HCM Programs with Community-based Organizations.” Signe Peterson Flieger, PhD, MSW, Tufts Health Plan Professor of Health Care Policy Research, Tufts University School of Medicine and her team are evaluating use and effectiveness of the “Who’s Your Agent? Program.”