Palliative care is specialized, holistic medical care focused on improving quality of life for people with serious illness. Palliative care teams, comprised of nurses, social workers, chaplains and physician focus on symptom management, decision making, expert communication, and psychosocial and spiritual issues. Video telemedicine (aka video visits) can help improve access to palliative care and many other specialties that care for seriously ill patients and overcome challenges to care that arise from geography, clinician staffing, office space, the burden for patients and families associated with traveling to brick-and-mortar clinics when they are symptomatic and/or functionally limited, and the timely assessment and management of symptoms. 

Palliative care is the #1 utilizer of video visits within UCSF Health. In our outpatient palliative care clinics over 50% of our visits are performed by video. Many of these visits are held between patients, families, who may be in different locations, and multiple members of our interprofessional team (i.e. physician, nursing, social work, chaplaincy).

In this 40-minute presentation, we will:

1) Provide a high-level overview of the exciting role of video visits in caring for seriously ill patients and families.

2) Host an interprofessional panel discussion of palliative care clinicians to explore their attitudes and experiences with video visits and highlight best practices. These best practices include back-office clinic workflows to support video visits, simple practices that can enhance clinician-patient rapport (i.e. lighting, room considerations, eye contact), and technology trouble-shooting.

Throughout this panel discussion, we will highlight pearls from a 2019 article published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine by Dr. Calton and colleagues across the country entitled, “Top 10 Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Telepalliative Care”.

3) Share recent data collected this Summer 2019 on patient and caregiver experiences receiving palliative care by video visits. This data includes over 30, fifteen-minute phone interviews with palliative care patients and 15, fifteen-minute phone interviews with caregivers exploring their satisfaction with video visits, perceived benefits and disadvantages of video visits, and what potentially sensitive topics they prefer to discuss in-person versus by video.

We anticipate this discussion will be valuable for any clinician or staff member interested in implementing video visits in their clinical practice and for those already performing video visits who want to grow and optimize their video visit offerings. It would be a privilege to share our extensive experience with our UCSF colleagues and beyond as we all work to ensure patients and families receive the best care possible.

Slides: https://ucsf.box.com/s/5ysyxc004a4er7r94d32ird5bb6y1e0f (MyAccess login required)