Assessment of Pulmonary Specialty Physicians' Approach to Advanced Care Planning in Patients With Chronic Pulmonary Diseases

The study will be a retrospective, observational study and analysis of charts of patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) or pulmonary fibrosis treated as outpatients at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Lung Center. Using pre-existing data, we will determine if advanced care planning has been discussed with these patients and record this information. For all patients, we will gather data about specific demographic and clinical characteristics that may have contributed to the presence or absence of these discussions. The study is descriptive in nature and is not powered to detect a difference between the two groups. Instead, we aim to describe the characteristics most frequently associated with advanced care planning discussion in these two particular groups.

Potential subjects will be identified with assistance from the Information Warehouse. After identification, data will be abstracted from pre-existing data in the electronic medical record and collected in a coded fashion for each subject. Each subject will be assigned an anonymous subject identification number and all links to identifying information will be destroyed prior to analysis. All study data will be stored on a secure password protected data base to which only study personnel will have access.