Nudges for Prognosis and Comfort Care in the ICU: Kate Courtright, Scott Halpern, & Jaspal Singh

Our main focus today was on nudging critical care clinicians to consider a more palliative approach to care.  Our guests are all trained in critical care: Kate Courtright, Scott Halpern, and Jaspal Singh.  Kate and Scott have additional training in palliative medicine. 

To start. we review:

• What is a nudge? Also called behavioral interventions, heuristics, and cognitive biases.

• Prior podcasts on the ethics of nudging, and a different trial conducted by Kate and Scott in which the default for hospitalized seriously ill patients was to receive a palliative care consult.

• What is sludge?  I’d never heard the term, perhaps outside of Eric’s pejorative reference to my coffee after adding copious creamers, flavoring, and sweeteners.  Sludge is apparently when you create barriers or extra work for someone.  For example, putting the healthy food at the back of the grocery store is sludge; making an applicant for health insurance climb the flight of stairs to the office - weeding out those less fit - is also sludge.  Prior-auth forms? Sludge.

• Examples of nudges, some based in health care, others in coffee. 

This specific study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, was conducted in 17 ICUs in North Carolina. Many were community hospitals.  Participants were critically ill and intubated.  Clinicians were randomized to 4 groups:

1. Usual care

2. Prognosis nudge - EHR prompt asking, do you think your patient will be alive in 6 months? This is called a focusing effect

3. Comfort care nudge - EHR prompt asking if they’d offered comfort-focused care. This is called accountable justification - an appeal to standards of care for critically ill patients endorsed by multiple professional societies.

4. Both the prognosis and comfort care nudge.

A few key points of discussion:

• Is an EHR prompt a nudge or sludge?  

• The intervention was a negative study for the primary outcome, hospital length of stay.  Why? 

• The prognosis nudge did nothing.  What to make of that? Would you think an EHR nudge to consider prognosis might move the needle, at least on some outcomes?

• The nudge toward offering comfort care led to more hospice and early comfort-care orders.  Is this due to chance alone, given the multiplicity of secondary outcomes examined?  Or is it a tantalizing finding that suggests a remarkably low cost EHR based nudge might, on a population level, lead to critical care clinicians offering comfort care and hospice more frequently?  Imagine!  

 -Alex Smith