I've lost count of how many times I've been at the bedside of a critically ill patient with no clear surrogate, or a healthcare proxy form that was never filled out. These situations force physicians into ethically complicated decisions under pressure, and they're almost entirely preventable.
The problem traces back to a system that treats advance care planning as a checkbox, not a clinical priority. By the time a patient lands in the ICU, the window has already closed.
In this week's Inefficiency Insights, I walk through why this keeps happening and the workflow I've built to get ahead of it.
