Interdisciplinary Communication: Documentation of Advance Care Planning and End-of-Life Care in Adolescents and Young Adults With Cancer.

Only 8 patients were reviewed, all from a previous trial and all had died, so this is a very small selected sample. One eligible death could not be reviewed because the patient died at another hospital. The study was a descriptive chart review, not a test of whether better documentation or a specific electronic health record format improves end-of-life care. The authors noted that releasing control participants' treatment preferences to treating physicians may have contaminated the original trial results. The findings come from one large tertiary pediatric hospital and may not apply to other settings, adults, or patients without cancer.

No author conflict of interest statement is provided in the supplied text. The article is listed as receiving NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.

Do not conclude that better electronic health record documentation improves end-of-life care. This paper described charts of patients who had died and found that goals of care notes were often hard to access, but it did not test whether changing the record changes care.