Navigating Value Elicitation: Insights from Palliative Care Providers

Healthcare providers play a crucial role in developing care plans for patients at the end of their lives. As value elicitation becomes increasingly integrated into advance care planning, digital tools have been proposed to support providers. However, the development of these tools has primarily focused on facilitating communication of values from patients to providers. To address providers' specific needs and barriers, such as using values to create and manage medical care plans, we conducted an exploratory study capturing provider perspectives. Through interviews with 18 palliative care providers, we identified what they consider the typical value elicitation process, its associated challenges, and their visions for an ideal future process. To guide future research in determining priority areas for technology intervention, we synthesized our findings into a conceptual model that visualizes providers' tasks in value elicitation. Comparing our model with previous models focused on patient and caregiver tasks, we found that provider perspectives introduce additional tasks in value elicitation that warrant attention: the creation, member-checking, and formal documentation of care plans by providers. Based on our findings, we argue that future work should focus on designing digital tools that support the provider-specific tasks of care plan creation and management to improve value elicitation.