The Washington Post published an extensive investigative story on hospice the other day. The take away: Hospices (mostly for-profits) are making big bucks by manipulating their case loads to maximize Medicare payments. In short, they are taking on many patients who are frail but not dying and thus staying on hospice care for a very long time. But the Post [...]
Almost one of every five patients in the intensive care units of a major teaching hospital got treatment that was futile or “probably” futile, according to the doctors who treated them. And older patients—especially those admitted from a nursing facility—were most likely to get care that does nothing to improve their quality of life, or even keep them alive for [...]
More people over 65 are dying in hospice care and fewer are dying in hospitals. But this good news is tempered by a very different story. People are also being hospitalized more frequently in the last three months of their lives, are more likely to spend time in intensive care units, and are often receiving hospice care for just a [...]
Health policymakers love the idea of hospice. Yet Medicare seems to be learning exactly the wrong lessons from the success of the program, which provides well-integrated patient-centered comfort care to people with terminal illness. Instead of trying to understand why hospice is growing in popularity, Medicare is instead making it harder to enroll. As often happens in its regulation of [...]
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel on end-of-life care jointly sponsored the Charles E. Smith Life Communities in Rockville MD, Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, MD,, and Sibley Hospital in Washington, D.C. The session was part of a day-long program on care transitions and highlighted the special importance of caring for the dying. My fellow panelists and I brought a wide [...]
An important new study finds that patients with metastatic lung cancer who received early palliative care both lived longer and reported a better quality of life than similar patients who had only standard cancer treatment. Palliative care focuses on treating symptoms, although, unlike hospice, patients may still receive treatment for their terminal disease if they wish. Palliative care also coordinates [...]