A Telehealth Pilot Of Me & My Wishes

Background: Long-term care (LTC) settings, such as assisted living and nursing homes, rarely have systematic approaches to elicit and communicate residents\u0027 end-of-life (EOL) care preferences Me \u0026 My Wishes provides a novel and systematic approach for residents living with Alzheimer\u0027s and related dementias to record videos about their care preferences that can be shared with staff and families in the care plan meeting With the onset of COVID-19, we modified on-site intervention procedures to a remote, telehealth platform In this pilot, we assessed the feasibility of telehealth-delivered Me \u0026 My Wishes Methods: From one assisted living and two nursing homes, we enrolled five residents living with dementia, their families (n=4) and care team members (n=8) We used the University of Utah Telehealth Network for research staff to video record residents remotely and for the facility care plan teams to help set up video recording, initiate the care plan meeting, share the video, and prompt conversation with meeting participants We surveyed residents, family, and staff on items related to the ease of setting up telehealth, connecting to the Internet, and communicating with meeting participants, using a scale of 1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree and open-ended questions We performed descriptive analyses Results: Residents reported that video recording via telehealth “worked well” and that they could see and hear the person they were talking to as well as if it were done in person Staff strongly agreed that setting up video recording using telehealth was easy (mean=5), and disagreed that connecting to the internet was problematic (mean=1) or that residents needed a lot of help setting up for video recording (mean=1 4) At the time of sharing the video, care teams easily connected with research staff;family participation was limited Connecting to the care plan meeting via telehealth was positive for the family member who participated All respondents agreed that sharing the video facilitated conversation about the resident\u0027s preferences Conclusions: Our findings suggest that Me \u0026 My Wishes can be delivered via a telehealth to achieve the program\u0027s goal of facilitating conversations about EOL preferences among residents living with dementia, staff, and remote family members, thus improving care coordination even when the post-COVID-19 LTC environment complicates or precludes in-person meetings