Background
Jewish Family Services of Ann Arbor (JFS) is a leading provider of aging services, offering holistic care management, caregiver support, nutrition services, and community engagement for older adults in the Ann Arbor area and beyond. Recognizing the growing need for comprehensive, accessible, and secure advance care planning, JFS partnered with Thanacare, a premier provider of digital advance care planning solutions, to better serve hundreds of individuals and families.
Objective
Traditionally, advance care planning (ACP) relied on paper documents and fragmented communication, often resulting in confusion, misalignment among family members, and difficulties in accessing critical healthcare directives when needed. JFS sought to:
Establish a streamlined, digital process for creating and storing ACP documents.
Ensure that healthcare power of attorney, spiritual and cultural wishes, and solo ager support were clearly documented and accessible.
Align JFS leaders, families, and the broader community around each individual’s healthcare preferences.
Offer multi-language ACP, including Russian and Farsi
Provide peace of mind for both clients and their loved ones by reducing uncertainty and stress during medical crises.
Approach
JFS uses Thanacare’s healthcare planning platform for its advance care planning services. Thanacare offers:
Highly secure, cloud-based storage for ACP documents, accessible anytime and anywhere across the healthcare continuum.
Step-by-step guidance for individuals and families to document healthcare power of attorney, spiritual and cultural wishes, and other end-of-life preferences.
Support for solo agers-those without immediate family or close contacts-by facilitating the assignment of healthcare surrogates (power of attorney) and ensuring their wishes are honored.
Collaboration tools that connect JFS leaders, care teams, and families, ensuring everyone is aligned around the individual’s healthcare plan.
Key Features and Impact
Digital ACP Documentation
Individuals and families can create, update, and securely store advance directives, including healthcare power of attorney and cultural/spiritual wishes, in their own words.
Real-Time Access & Sharing
ACP documents are accessible to authorized family members and clinicians, ensuring wishes are honored across care settings.
Solo Ager Support
Solo agers can designate trusted advocates, reducing isolation and ensuring their preferences are respected.
Community & Family Alignment
Facilitates open conversations and shared understanding, reducing family conflict and confusion during crises.
Scalability & Efficiency
JFS has implemented this process for hundreds of individuals, streamlining workflows and increasing advance directive completion rates.
Outcomes
Increased Advance Directive Completion: JFS has significantly raised the rate of completed and accessible advance care plans, ensuring that wishes are known and respected when it matters most.
Peace of Mind: Clients and their families report reduced anxiety and greater confidence knowing that healthcare decisions will align with their values and preferences.
Enhanced Support for Solo Agers: Solo agers are empowered to make their own choices and designate surrogates, addressing a critical gap in traditional ACP models.
Cultural and Spiritual Sensitivity: The platform allows for detailed documentation of spiritual and cultural wishes, ensuring care is personalized and respectful.
Conclusion
By leveraging Thanacare, JFS has transformed its approach to advance care planning-moving from paper-based, siloed processes to a secure, collaborative, and person-centered digital solution. This innovation not only brings peace of mind to hundreds of individuals and families but also sets a new standard for holistic, inclusive, and effective healthcare planning in the community.
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Doulas find value by digitizing documentation, distribution, adn alignment of ACP
Background
We are all Living and Leaving. Keri Winchester of Living and Leaving offers compassionate support to clients in end-of-life planning, through conversation, organization, education and action. Keri believes that the last gift we can give those we leave behind is having a plan in place. She sought a tool to help bolster her important work.
Challenge
Paper documents are the norm when it comes to advance care planning, but Living and Leaving wanted to digitize and elevate this traditional approach to the tele-ACP experience.
Approach
Living and Leaving meets with clients at the cafe, in the community center, and via video conference to begin the conversation around end-of-life care. After a relationship is formed, documentation of these important wishes are made within Thanacare so that they become certified, portable, and known to all members of the care team.
Results
Living and Leaving was able to increase the amount of clients with robust advance care planning documented and distributed while building strong alignment among client's family and loved ones.
The Empowered Endings Foundation has a mission is to optimize palliative and end of life care by filling gaps in the healthcare system across the nation—and to ensure that everyone has access to the resources, education, or support they need and deserve due to financial limitations
Objective
Dr. Bob and Elizabeth Uslander sought to expand the reach of the Empowered Endings™ Foundation’s commitment to ensuring everyone has access to the information, support, and community of palliative and end of life care.
Approach
Empowered Endings created the Empowered End of Life Experience™ which features the Empowered Endings™ Planning Platform, powered by Thanacare
This safe and secure platform is designed to document end of life preferences through a customized step-by-step process and empower individuals and families with clear, accessible, and actionable directives. These advance health care directives cover:
Personal values and healthcare wishes – Ensuring decisions align with an individual’s unique priorities.
End of life options – Including MAiD, VSED, and other available care pathways.
Dementia and cognitive decline planning – Addressing future scenarios with clarity and foresight.
After-death care preferences – Documenting wishes for body disposition, memorials, and legacy planning.
Secure video wishes storage – Allowing clients to record personal messages, reinforcing their directives.
Safe and accessible document storage – Information can be securely stored and shared with medical teams, health care agents, and loved ones via QR codes and email, ensuring access anywhere, anytime.
Engage your populations in culturally sensitive, responsive and appropriate documentation related to end-of-life wishes
Families desire to know what their loved one wants at the end of life and sharing and documenting those important wishes is what Thanacare was built for