The District of Columbia Hospital Association has, for almost 45 years, worked to advance the missions of the hospitals and health systems of the District of Columbia by promoting policies and initiatives that strengthen the system of care, preserve access and promote better health outcomes for the patients and communities they serve. The role of the Director, Workforce Development is to assist in executing the Association’s strategic workforce priorities, including managing the work of the DC Health Care Workforce Partnership as a workforce intermediary.

DCHA is partnering with the DC Department of Health Care Finance/CRISP DC to provide our hospitals with access to an electronic advance care planning platform aimed at improving staff workflow and supporting the quality of patient care.

MyDirectives for Clinicians Integrated in the CRISP DC HIE
This user-friendly platform allows health care providers to create, upload, and view new digital advance care planning forms whenever and wherever they are needed across all patient care teams with access to the DC HIE. Advance care planning forms available through the platform include DC MOST, National POLST, Psychiatric Advance Directive and Universal Advance Digital Directive.

How MyDirectives for Clinicians Improves the Quality of Patient Care

• All care teams, including ambulatory providers, will have access to patients’ current care planning goals, objectives, and decisions across future, urgent, and end-of-life care.
• Facilitates care that is more personalized and aligned with the patient’s preferences and priorities.
• Enables smooth transitions between different care settings as all providers are aware of the patient’s care plans.

Highlights: A generalized increase is noted across all focus utilization metrics this month compared to January 2020 baseline. Acute care admissions moved from -13% under the baseline last month to -10% in May (Fig. 1) with all except one hospital showing a slight increase in volumes as shown in Table 2 of the report. Emergency department visits and psychiatric admissions both show a slight increase in volumes this month going from -23% to -22% and -21% to -19% below baseline respectively. Observation admissions and ambulatory surgeries continue to remain over 2020 baseline as portrayed in Fig. 1 below.

Reduced variation in observation admissions has been seen over the past few months. In addition, volumes show a recovery compared to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic after the emergency was declared in March 2020 as depicted in Fig. 2 below. Comparing March 2023 to March 2020 volumes there is a noted recovery even though some variation is observed as depicted in Fig. 2. Conversely, psychiatric admissions continue to fluctuate around the post-COVID median and have returned to pre-COVID volumes with the biggest drop observed from March to April 2020 following the emergency declaration as shown in Fig. 3 below.