How Palliative Care Can Address Leadership and Partner Priorities

Health care leaders are making financial and operational changes to ensure sustainability during a time of ongoing uncertainty.

Read below to learn what your program's collaborators may be worried about and how palliative care can help to solve the problems of the moment.

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Ensuring organizational readiness for patient/family communications, and for effective symptom management (via direct clinical services and by providing education and clinical tools to colleagues, such as goals of care conversation scripts)
  • Health systems, hospitals, and specialty practices benefit
• Ensuring that care plans are in place for high-risk/high-need patients, and that their needs are proactively addressed (to avoid crises and minimize avoidable contact with health care system)
  • Health plans, long-term care organizations, and at-risk provider organizations benefit
• Ensuring Emergency Department through-put
  • Health systems and hospitals benefit

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Ensuring optimal use and through-put of intensive care, enabling continued critical care admissions and managing expenses
• Impacting direct costs per admission, including reducing length-of-stay for complex patients; savings can be roughly $3,000 per admission (compared to a palliative care team cost of less than $1,000 per admission)
• Expediting appropriate admission to hospice (important for hospitals), and improving hospice length-of-stay (important for hospices and health plans)
• Demonstrating good stewardship of resources through staff productivity and appropriate billing practices
• Potentially reducing malpractice claims by improving patient, family, and care team shared decision-making