Compassionate Care Act

The Compassionate Care Act seeks to significantly improve end-of-life care across the United States. It emphasizes advance care planning , defining it as a process of discussing future care preferences and documenting them through instruments like advance directives and living wills . To achieve this, the bill mandates a national public education campaign , led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services through the CDC, to inform the public about the importance of advance care planning, their right to direct healthcare decisions, and the availability of hospice and palliative care. This campaign will utilize various media, provide culturally appropriate information, and run continuously for at least five years. The legislation also focuses heavily on provider education and support. It directs the Secretary to establish or expand an internet website for healthcare providers under Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the Indian Health Service, offering resources on advance care planning requirements, quality improvement, EHR integration, and best practices for discussing end-of-life care. Furthermore, the bill creates an advance care curricula pilot program to award grants to medical and nursing schools, among others, for establishing end-of-life training requirements in their degree programs, covering topics from discussing advance care planning to linguistic and cultural competency. It also requires the development of core end-of-life care quality measures for various provider settings and the creation of new continuing education curricula for qualified health care providers on advance care planning and palliative care principles. In addition to education, the Act amends Medicare to permanently extend the authorization for telehealth to conduct face-to-face encounters prior to hospice recertification. It also removes geographic restrictions for advance care planning services furnished via telehealth , making these services more accessible. Finally, the bill mandates several studies and reports , including one by the Secretary on barriers to a national uniform policy on advance directives and the feasibility of a national form, and another by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the feasibility of a national advance directive registry. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will also study EHR integration for advance care planning documents and initiate demonstration programs for interoperability and electronic authentication of advance directives.