CARE-IT

Name: CARE-IT
Author: Stanford University

Stanford University

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Expert-developed at a leading university

For:Clinicians & Healthcare ProfessionalsPatients & Caregivers

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App Summary

The CARE-IT app guides patients and their families through creating and sharing advance care plans with medical providers. Stanford physicians and computer science students developed the platform to address the common avoidance of end-of-life conversations between patients and providers. The platform gives users a private way to document their wishes through guided questions and video recordings, helping ensure their preferences are understood by family and doctors.

App Screenshots

Detailed Description

Functionality & Mechanism

This digital advanced care planning platform from Stanford Medicine is designed to prompt end-of-life conversations. The app, CARE-IT, utilizes a three-part structure to guide users. Its "Learn" module provides educational content, "Record" facilitates the completion of advance planning forms and video-recorded preferences, and "Share" enables users to distribute these materials to family and healthcare providers. The platform also integrates with the native Health app to centralize key information for users.

Development & Context

The app was created by a team of Stanford physicians and computer science students to address the problem of patients receiving unwanted end-of-life treatments.
Development was driven by the observation that approximately 65% of chronically ill patients do not discuss their end-of-life care preferences with a physician.
The news coverage notes the tool was built using CardinalKit, an open-source framework from Stanford designed to accelerate digital health application development.
A pilot program with patients was planned in collaboration with the primary care team at Stanford Health Care to assess its use in a clinical setting.

Intended Use & Scope

CARE-IT is designed for individuals and their families to engage with advance care planning independently. It serves as an educational and documentation resource that supports, but does not replace, direct conversations with healthcare providers. The platform aims to prepare patients for clinical discussions or, for some, to sufficiently document their wishes on their own.

In the Media

A digital approach to end-of-life planning

Stanford physicians Lance Downing and Nick Bott developed CARE-IT to address end-of-life planning conversations, using a digital approach created through the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign course that pairs computer science students with physicians. The app tackles what Bott calls the "trap of silence," where "patients wait for providers to initiate the conversation at the appropriate time" while providers struggle with prognostic uncertainty and emotionally difficult discussions. The development emerged from research showing that 65% of chronically ill patients don't have end-of-life care conversations with their physicians.

STANFORDRead article