Vynca And South Carolina Coalition For The Care Of The Seriously Ill Collaborate To Enhance End-Of-Life Care

Columbia, SC and Palo Alto, CA /PRNewswire/ - Vynca, a provider of advance care planning solutions, and the South Carolina Coalition for the Care of the Seriously Ill (CSI) have collaborated to implement Vynca's advance care planning technology to enhance end-of-life care for patients. This solution, in the form of an electronic registry, will allow health care providers to access this information at the point of care; thus, helping to ensure that health care decisions are honored.

Through the generous support of the BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation, CSI is providing financial support for the state's advance care planning initiative, My Life My Choices, to assist Community Outreach Partners in the implementation of activities to improve advance care planning and to promote the use of advance care planning documentation. CSI sees the implementation of the electronic registry as a critical step to document, store and access this information regardless of the health care setting. This is not only an important milestone for My Life My Choices, but it also positions South Carolina to fully implement a statewide registry in the future.

Advance care planning documents allow people to document their future healthcare preferences should they be unable to speak for themselves. However, the lack of infrastructure to support and sustain an electronic registry can make it difficult for providers to find and access patients' documents, especially during emergencies. Vynca's robust platform ensures that advance care documents, including Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST) forms, truly reflect patient preferences and are quickly available electronically to health care providers where and when needed.

According to Dr.John Ropp, III, MD, FAAFP, Chairman of CSI and a board-certified Family Medicine and Hospice and Palliative Medicine clinician, "An electronic registry is essential to ensuring advance care planning documents are accessible and honored. This technology allows health care systems to seamlessly integrate with many of the electronic health record platforms to provide better care to patients and families in South Carolina."

Vynca is the leading provider of advance care planning technology solutions, and CSI joins several other organizations throughout the United States using Vynca's technology to electronically capture, store, and access patients' advance care planning documents.

"Our partnership with CSI is an important step in ensuring that patient preferences are aligned with patient care in South Carolina," said Ryan Van Wert, M.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of Vynca. "Through our collaborations with a growing number of health systems, we're making an impact in terms of higher quality of care at the end-of-life, and avoidance of unwanted health care interventions. This speaks to the fact that patients' wishes are being electronically documented, accessed and honored in a way that they were not previously."

Van Wert said that Vynca has contracts with over 80 hospitals to implement and deploy its advance care planning solution, and supports digital registry services to several states across the U.S., including California,Delaware,Oregon, and Louisiana.

You can find more information about advance care planning at www.mylifemychoices.org. This interactive website providers numerous resources to help support individuals as well as health care providers in having meaningful conversations about health care wishes and documenting those wishes in an advance directive that can be shared with health care providers via the electronic registry.

About South Carolina Coalition for the Care of the Seriously Ill
Founded in 2010, South Carolina Coalition for the Care of the Seriously Ill (SC CSI) is a statewide coalition that brings key organizations, clinicians, and health care entities together to collaboratively redesign care, improve quality of life, and protect the ethical rights of the seriously, chronically, or terminally ill in South Carolina. Its mission is to ensure all persons in SC with serious, chronic, or terminal illnesses will have an active voice in the care decision process.

The coalition is committed to improving the shared decision-making for this population by implementing strategies which help patients understand the typical trajectory of their condition and take an active role in their treatment, including decisions about their care. Charter members include: South Carolina Medical Association, South Carolina Hospital Association, South Carolina Nurses Association, The Carolinas Center for Hospice and End-of-Life Care, South Carolina Healthcare Ethics Network, South Carolina Society of Chaplains, Sharing Hope SC, and AARP South Carolina.

About the BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation
The BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina Foundation is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.

About Vynca
Vynca, based in Palo Alto, Calif., provides comprehensive advance care planning technology solutions that enable health care organizations to deliver high-quality end-of-life care consistent with an individual's preferences. The company helps patients, families and health care providers have meaningful conversations about future care preferences, ensure that wishes are documented accurately, and provides real-time access to this critical information throughout the care continuum.

Vynca is also the leading solution provider for state advance care planning registries, having first partnered with the Oregon POLST Registry to develop a bi-directional electronic interface for health care organizations in Oregon. It is also the technology vendor for the California POLST eRegistry Pilot, the Delaware DMOST Registry, and the Louisiana LaPOST Registry. For more information, visit www.vyncahealth.com. Follow Vynca on LinkedIn and Twitter @VyncaHealth.