Family conferences facilitate medical decision making, especially in the fields of palliative care and intensive care. Taiwan’s National Health Insurance started covering family conferences for palliative medicine in 2012 and has increased the coverage and budgets since 2015 with the goal of promoting general acceptance of palliative medicine in Taiwan.
However, there are many difficulties in holding family conferences whose success relies to a great extent on physicians’ communication skills. However, better clinical outcomes of and patient satisfaction with shared decision-making can be achieved by humanizing communication with more empathetic approaches like VALUE (Value, Acknowledge, Listen, Understand, and Elicit) and PLACE (Prepare, Listen, Agree, Connect, and Explore). This is of particular significance during times of pandemic. It is our hope that, in the future, shared decision-making with the help of humanized communication approaches is advocated to be the standard medical practice in different fields, not restricted to palliative care.