Discrepant advanced directives and code status orders: a preventable medical error.
Meisenberg B, Zaidi S, Franks L, et al. Discrepant Advanced Directives and Code Status Orders: A Preventable Medical Error. J Hosp Med. 2019;14(10):716-718. doi:10.12788/jhm.3244.
Advanced Directives (AD) and Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Therapy (POLST) are intended to improve end-of-life care by ensuring that patient's wishes are honored by health care providers. This perspective presents two cases in which preventable errors allowed for the use of unwanted life-sustaining therapies. Root cause analyses for these cases found that haste, inadequate communication, EMR discrepancies, knowledge deficits contributed to these errors.