Background:

To provide patient-centered healthcare for people with serious illness, healthcare teams must elicit needs, goals, preferences, and values from patients and care partners.

Aim:

Describe feasibility and acceptability of an electronic pre-visit agenda-setting questionnaire for patients and care partners to identify these topics before ambulatory palliative care visits.

Design:

Concurrent mixed-methods formative evaluation of questionnaire feasibility and acceptability. We extracted questionnaire responses and patient characteristics from electronic health records and sent anonymous post-visit patient experience surveys. Researchers conducted thematic analysis on semi-structured interviews with participants.

Setting/participants:

Patient participants had an active patient portal account and ambulatory visit at a free-standing palliative care clinic in a tertiary academic medical center in rural Northeastern United States between June 2021 and March 2023. Clinic staff included physicians, nurse practitioner, social worker, nurses, and scheduling secretary. Most visits were conducted via video or telephone.

Results:

Completion rate was 50% for pre-visit questionnaires (2107 of 4204 visits). Patients completing post-visit surveys (following 859 visits) reported the pre-visit questionnaire was easy to complete (75%) and helped their conversations with clinicians (79%). Patients who believed their clinician reviewed their responses rated shared decision-making higher (82%) than those who did not (59%). Semi-structured interviews with five patients, two care partners, and seven clinicians identified four themes: the questionnaire engages patients in pre-visit planning, incorporates care partners into the care team, facilitates care for the care partner, and improves perceived efficiency and care quality.

Conclusions:

An electronic pre-visit questionnaire was feasible and acceptable in ambulatory palliative care visits.