Center to Advance Palliative Care

I'm writing from the PC Leadership Center of the Bluegrass. Our program does not do home visits. One of our emphases is with an out-patient clinic. We have used the Missoula Vitas tool during initial and subsequent visits to track progress across time. We've used this on a sampling of our clients and find that it provides an excellent visual way of demonstrating clinical progress.

The Edmonton Symptom Assessment tool is used in our hospital based PC program. All of the PCLCs used a modified version of this as a way to track, on a daily basis, patient's clinical progress. It serves multiple purposes, but for one it shows any clinician coming in to assess/evaluate a patient, what kind of progress is being/not made.

We've found that sampling a portion of your records helps to show improvement from initial visit to final visit and makes a great visual when making presentations.

At Brown University Center for Gerontology they've done some work and I would encourage you to follow their lead with an ARNP PC consult service in the long-term care arena.
Joan Teno, Theresa Rochon, Barzalai and Hall have written about their efforts.

I hope this helps. Janet Braun