Which Patients Are Most Likely To Delay Hospice Enrollment?
Thursday, September 11, 2014 - 18:40
in Health & Medicine
Almost 20 percent cancer patients wait to enroll in Hospice until their last three days of life. Their courage and determination is admirable, Hospice is palliative care, but it shortchanges both patients and their families and a new paper seeks to create a profile for people like to be late admissions. The team examined de-identified data from electronic medical records of 64,264 patients in 12 hospices in the Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness network from January 2008 to May 2013. Hospices spanned 11 states, including Pennsylvania, with censuses ranging from 400 to 1,700 patients per day. Of those 64,264 patients, 10,460 had a hospice stay of 3 days or fewer. read more
