Feasibility of a Digital Goals-of-Care Decision Aid for Clinicians and Families of Patients With SABI

Every 30 seconds an adult in the U.S. suffers a severe acute brain injury (SABI) from traumatic brain injury or large ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, resulting in 200,000 deaths and >900,000 survivors living with disability annually. Every day, surrogate decision-makers face the difficult "goals of care" decision in intensive care units (ICUs) to continue or withdraw life support while considering the patient's long-term prognosis. In this study, we will pilot test a pragmatic, scalable intervention to overcome ongoing problems with high stakes decision-making by surrogates of patients with SABI in ICUs. These problems are an important target for intervention, because they contribute to 3 major clinical and public health issues: 1) family members struggle in the role of surrogate, leading to lasting symptoms of psychological distress; 2) clinicians are poorly trained in communicating prognosis after SABI, often doing so with variability and bias, inadequately preparing families for their decisions; 3) patients often receive burdensome treatments that they would not choose.

Decision aids improve the quality of patients' decisions based on a large evidence-base, but no empirically validated tools currently exist for surrogate decision-making in SABI patients at high risk for death or disability. This is problematic because surrogates of SABI patients are unprepared for the difficult decisions about the use of life support and patients' potential long-term disability, which hinge on both medical information and the patient's values and preferences. We have developed and refined a tailored digital, web-based decision aid (DA) for families of critically ill SABI patients, conceptually grounded in the Ottawa Decision Support Framework, to enhance, not replace, clinician-family communication. We will leverage a digital platform, which is portable and shareable among family members when geographically distant or not allowed to visit the ICU (as during the COVID-19 pandemic) and allows integration of videos to reach lower-literacy groups. This innovative tool challenges the existing paradigm for decision-making in SABI patients.

This pilot study among 50 surrogates of SABI patients and their clinicians will assess the feasibility of deploying the web-based tool as well as to explore the tools impact on measures of communication and decision-quality.

Inclusion criteria

for surrogates and patients:

• surrogate is age 18 years or older, no upper age limit;
• documented surrogate decision-maker (official health care proxy, or legal next of kin) of a critically ill severe acute brain injury (SABI) patient ≥ 3 days after admission;
• patient is age 18 years or older, no upper age limit;
• patient has SABI; defined as either traumatic brain injury, spontaneous primary intracerebral hemorrhage (not due to tumor or vascular malformation), or hemispheric acute ischemic stroke;
• patient is"critically ill" defined as either intubated on a mechanical ventilator, or unable to swallow without a feeding tube (even if not intubated/ventilated);
• patient is judged by the attending physician to have ≥40% risk of death or long-term functional impairment, elicited by asking the attending physician, "does this patient have at least a 40% chance of in-hospital mortality or long-term functional impairment?", defined as needing assistance with at least 1 activity of daily living (ADL).
• patient has undergone initial stabilization but remains critically ill;
• surrogate will participate in clinician-family goals of care meeting, either in person or via video- or telephone-conference.
• surrogate must be English speaking and literate

Exclusion criteria

for surrogates and patients:

• devastating patients with severe SABI who die early (within the first 3 days after admission);
• surrogate decision-maker is non-English speaking;
• surrogate decision-maker is illiterate.

Inclusion criteria

for clinicians:

• clinical treating attending, or physician trainee (fellow, resident), or licensed affiliated practitioner who will lead the clinician-family meeting when goals-of-care are discussed;
• clinician may decline participation in the outcome measures but cannot restrict the surrogate decision-maker in study participation.

Exclusion criteria

for clinicians:

• unwillingness to comply with study protocol.