Honoring Choices and Helping Patients Make End of Life Decisions

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Honoring Choices and Helping Patients Make End of Life Decisions

Presented By: Deirdre Mylod – the Chair of the Advisory Board for Honoring Choices

John Bruinsma – Manager of Population Health Care Foundation & Chair for Honoring Choices, Beacon Community Impact

Learning Objectives:

• Provide an overview of Honoring Choices, Beacon’s community partner in Advance Care Planning
• Describe the Current State of Advance Care Planning in terms of the patient experience, the clinician’s experience, outcomes, policy and equitable distribution.
• Identify Barriers to completing Advance Care Planning from the perspective of patients and clinicians.
• Gather Audience Feedback
• Provide an overview of Beacon’s partnership with Honoring Choices through the scope of the Technical Assistance Grant

John Bruinsma is the Director of Beacon Health System’s Population Health, Care Coordination Department, a team of clinical and social service professionals who execute patient level interactions to drive the organization’s value-based goals.  As the Population Health leader, John contributes experience in healthcare management, community engagement, and social services to advise the Health System’s strategies for improving patient outcomes and delivering chronic illness management. John plays a pivotal role in advancing quality, transitional and chronic care coordination.  John has lead several transformative changes, including the roll-out of a Remote Patient Monitoring program, collaborative partnerships with community organizations and healthcare services providers, and the integration of Social Determinant screenings in the acute environment.

Prior to his current role, John served as the Senior Community Services Coordinator at Saint Joseph Health System, where he spearheaded the launch and management of the Community Health Worker (CHW) program. This initiative demonstrated significant ROI and quality enhancements, underscoring his commitment to addressing social determinants of health and improving patient outcomes.

With a background in management, marketing and program coordination, John brings a unique blend of skills in strategic planning, grant writing, community engagement, and team leadership to every endeavor.

Outside of his professional pursuits, John is passionate about expanding access to Advance Care Planning and Palliative Care and has actively contributed to the board of Honoring Choices, a local non-profit that proactively engages the community in quality of life care planning for several years.

John holds a master’s in business administration degree from Bethel University and an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Hope College and continues to seek opportunities for growth and impact in his field.

Dr. Deirdre Mylod has spent over 25 years at Press Ganey researching the patient experience and how it relates to cross domain outcomes of engagement and clinical quality. She is the architect of Press Ganey’s Patient Suffering model and has extended her work to create a conceptual framework to describe the work experience of clinicians and the healthcare workforce.
Dr. Mylod joined Press Ganey in 1997 and currently serves as the executive director of the organization’s Institute for Innovation and senior vice president of Research & Analytics. In this joint role, she is responsible for advancing the understanding of the entire patient experience, including patient perceptions of care, clinical process and outcomes. Through the Institute, Mylod partners with leading health care providers to study and implement transformative concepts for improving the patient experience.
Since July 2020, Dr. Mylod has co-led Press Ganey’s Equity Partnership together with her colleague, Dr. Tejal Gandhi. Through this work she has surfaced national patterns of patient and workforce experience segmented by race, ethnicity and other aspects of identity, and has created best practices in data management and data visualization to support equity work.
Mylod holds a master’s degree and a PhD in psychology from the University of Notre Dame.