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Aging • Innovation National Healthcare Decisions Week

This week marks ‘National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD)’ which inspires, educates and empowers families and health care providers about the importance of advance care planning. NHDD encourages patients to express their health care wishes and helps providers to listen for, understand and execute on those wishes. The theme for 2017 NHDD is “It Always Seems Too Early, Until It’s Too Late.”

NHDD inspired us to share innovative initiatives that help ‘start the conversation’. 

  • IDEO partners with leading organizations to drive collaboration, innovation and impact around the world’s toughest problems.  In 2015, IDEO launched an Open Challenge on end of life care. As part of the Open Challenge, they promoted two weeks of storytelling events that included ‘Death by Design’—that empowers individuals to design their own death to reflect their values,  likes and personality.  According to IDEO “death can be a beautiful experience and not just a final destination.”
  • Death over Dinner– gathers dozens of medical and wellness leaders to cast an unflinching eye at the end of life, and they have created an uplifting interactive adventure that transforms this seemingly difficult conversation into one of deep engagement, insight and empowerment.
  • Common Practice’s mission is to design the practical tools that make hard conversations easier for everyone. Too often, conversations about what matters most to us are avoided – in healthcare, but also in our daily lives. 
  • The Conversation Project is dedicated to helping people talk about their wishes for end-of-life care. It’s time to transform our culture so we shift from not talking about dying to talking about it. It’s time to share the way we want to live at the end of our lives. And it’s time to communicate about the kind of care they want and don’t want for themselves.
  • Compassion & Choices is the nation’s oldest, largest and most active nonprofit organization committed to improving care and expanding options for the end of life. Across the nation, we work to ensure healthcare providers honor and enable patients’ decisions about their care.