Study of Default Options in Advance Directives
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT01817686. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Official title
Default Options in Advance Directives for Veterans With Serious Illnesses: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Default options represent the events or conditions that are set into place if no alternatives are actively chosen. The setting of default options has well-established effects on a broad range of human decisions, but its influence on patients' preferences for end-of-life care is only beginning to be understood. This is a 3-armed randomized clinical trial in Veterans at high risk for critical illness, assessing the impact of Advance Directive (AD) forms framed with different default options. The central goals are to assess how default options in ADs influence the end-of-life care choices made by patients at risk for critical care, and these patients' hospital and ICU utilization. The investigators hypothesize that setting defaults in real ADs will increase the proportion of Veterans selecting comfort-oriented plans of care, decrease selections of life-extending therapies such as mechanical ventilation and dialysis, and reduce the proportion of time during follow-up that Veterans spend in the hospital and/or ICU, without affecting patient satisfaction with end-of-life care planning.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT01817686
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 62 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
- COPD
- Severe or Very Severe Airflow Obstruction and/or Receiving or Eligible to Receive Long-term Oxygen Therapy
- Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
- Other Interstitial Lung Disease Without Curative Therapy
- Congestive Heart Failure
- NYHA Class IV or NYHA Class III Plus 1 Hospitalization in the Past Year
- Malignancy
- Any Stage 3B or 4 Solid Tumor
Interventions
- Comfort Default AD forms Other
- Life Extension Default AD forms Other
- Standard Default AD forms Other
Other
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 18 Years and older
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Feb 28, 2013
- Primary completion
- May 31, 2015
- Completion
- May 31, 2015
- Last update posted
- Jun 29, 2015
2013 – 2015
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center | Philadelphia | Pennsylvania | 19104 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT01817686, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Jun 29, 2015 · Synced Sep 5, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT01817686 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.