New Funding, Partnerships and Website Features for Advanced Care Planning Tool PREPARE

Every day, the PREPARE website continues to help thousands of people engage in advance care planning. The PREPARE team has also been busy behind the scenes. In recent weeks, we have been awarded new grant funding, launched a new version of the site, created partnerships, and won awards. We are pleased to share details on these exciting developments.

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Awards Funding

We are pleased and grateful to announce that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded PREPARE $650,000 to create easy-to-read English and Spanish advance directives customized for all 50 United States, using our California advance directive (AD) template as a template. We will incorporate PREPARE’s “Summary of My Wishes” into the advance directives, and create online steps to guide people to complete the forms on our site. When complete, PREPARE will offer the first easy-to-read, culturally-appropriate, evidenced-based advance directive that can be used in every state.

OptumCare Partnership

PREPARE has announced a new collaboration with OptumCare, a nationwide care delivery organization that is part of Optum, a health services and innovation company. Through a license agreement with UCSF, OptumCare will pilot the use of PREPARE with patients to improve advance care planning. We will evaluate the effectiveness of this collaboration using PREPARE's new reporting functions to measure uptake among OptumCare patients.

New Website Improves the PREPARE experience

We recently launched PREPARE version 2.0. Users can now complete the five steps in any order, and develop a personal action plan at any point in the process. Users can also add open-ended comments to action plans, personalizing them to support conversations with providers and medical decision makers. We have improved site functionality for smart phone and tablet users, and simplified sign-in. We also created a dashboard that will allow partner institutions to track usage and implementation of PREPARE in their workflow. In addition, PREPARE can be modified to be branded or “white labeled” by external partners.

PREPARE Wins Let’s Get Healthy California Innovation Challenge

PREPARE was one of 23 winning innovations in the Let’s Get Healthy California Innovation Challenge, run by the California Health and Human Services Agency and California Department of Public Health. All of the winners were acknowledged for advancing the Let’s Get Healthy California goal of making California the nation’s healthiest state by 2022.

PREPARE was also a big part of National Healthcare Decisions Day this year throughout the University of California San Francisco. PREPARE was introduced to all 25,000 UCSF employees via a system wide email and PREPARE pamphlets shared at all of UCSF locations.

We are happy to be an active part of the growing advance care planning movement, and thank you for your continued support.

Rebecca Sudore, MD