The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine established a Roundtable on Quality of Care for People with Serious Illness. Through meetings, public workshops, and background papers, the Roundtable fosters an ongoing dialogue about critical policy and research issues to accelerate and sustain progress in care for people of all ages with serious illness. Inspired by previous work, including the 2014 IOM report Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life, the roundtable convenes key stakeholders to focus on five priority areas:

• Delivery of person-centered, family-oriented care, including mechanisms to reduce multiple transitions between care settings during advanced illness and in the final phase of life; recognition and support for the role of family caregivers; and efforts to ensure that critically ill individuals and their families understand the benefits of, and have access to, palliative care.
• Communication and advance care planning, including clinician-initiated conversations with individuals and loved ones about end-of-life care values, goals, and preferences; policies to support and incentivize such conversations; and methods to record individual preferences and ensure that they are honored.
• Professional education and development, including attention to palliative care in medical and nursing school curricula; reducing educational siloes to improve the development of inter-professional teams; and providers’ communication skills.
• Policies and payment systems, including policies to reduce payment siloes and incentives that will result in use of helpful services; scale-up of successful programs that integrate health care and long-term social services; policies to incentivize the provision of comprehensive palliative care; and the development of quality standards and measures.
• Public education and engagement, including strategies to promote informed understanding of advanced care and end-of-life care issues among diverse groups; efforts to motivate health care consumers to seek high-quality care for themselves and their loved ones; and efforts to normalize conversations about death and dying through storytelling and advocacy at multiple levels.

The Roundtable will be limited to a three-year term in order to focus its activities on tangible, short-term goals. Activities associated with the Roundtable will include expert meetings, public workshops and webinars, summary publications, and targeted communications and community engagement activities. Roundtable membership will include federal agencies, health insurers, advocates, patients, health care providers, foundations, academics, and others interested in the topic.
All activities of the Roundtable will be conducted in accordance with institutional guidelines described in “Roundtables: Policy and Procedures.”