BUFFALO, NY – HEALTHeLINK is helping patients, their families, and their providers communicate more clearly and make better informed care decisions with advance care planning documents now available through its health information network. This information includes goals-of-care discussions and electronic documentation such as living wills, health care proxy, do not resuscitate, and medical orders for life-sustaining treatment.
“HEALTHeLINK is meeting providers where they are as to how they document their patients wishes and are making advance care planning documents more accessible, including during emergency care, pre-visit planning, and other clinical workflows where timely access to patient wishes is essential,” said Dan Porreca, president and CEO, HEALTHeLINK. “By supporting more informed decision making, HEALTHeLINK is helping providers better understand and honor patient wishes when they can no longer speak for themselves, reduce uncertainty, and provide comfort for family members during medical emergencies.”
The creation and initial execution of HEALTHeLINK’s advance care planning functionality was funded through a grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)’s Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology program. The grant portion successfully concluded in August 2026.
With this funding, HEALTHeLINK addressed a persistent clinical problem – advanced care planning and advance directive documents are often created, scanned, stored, or updated in separate systems, making them difficult or impossible to locate electronically at the exact point when they are most needed.
Over the three years of the grant project, HEALTHeLINK expanded access to and usability of advance care planning documents and advance directives across care settings through interoperative, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based technology. The FHIR standard defines how health care information can be exchanged between different computer systems regardless of how it is stored in those systems.
While the grant period has ended, HEALTHeLINK remains committed to this work and efforts continue to onboard additional advance care planning data sources and educate participants on available advance care planning services. Increasing access to these documents through HEALTHeLINK is a natural extension of the organization’s mission to improve health at the point of care and strengthen connections across the Western New York community.
Currently, 61 data sources and more than 73,000 advance care planning documents are available to participating HEALTHeLINK providers for their consented patients.
In addition, at the recent Civitas Networks for Health Annual Conference, HEALTHeLINK was recognized for its work in making advance care planning documents more accessible as the recipient of the 2026 Innovation Pioneer – Community Excellence Award.
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About HEALTHeLINK
HEALTHeLINK serves as a resource for broad health system transformation through secure data-informed decision making for individual patient care and to support community investments with a purpose of improving health, health care, and collaboration with local health care providers and those who are connected via the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY) to improve health outcomes and health care delivery, control costs, and increase access to care in Western New York. HEALTHeLINK is also a founding member of Civitas Networks for Health, a national collaborative working to use health information exchange to improve health. Providers and patients can visit wnyhealthelink.com or @HEALTHeLINK on Facebook, X, or LinkedIn for more information.