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Palliative Care and the ICU

Next Reply: Re:Palliative Consults in critical care units
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Post Palliative Consults in critical care units
Author: njoyner
Date: Jan 20, 2009 1:51 pm
I am wondering what percentage of consults are done in the the critical care units, the reason(s) for the consult and average number of follow-up visits. What discipline does the intake to see appropriateness for the visit? Is care planning (i.e., withholding or withdrawing treatment) with just a one time billable visit avoided and delegated to other members of the team that do not bill?
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Re:Palliative Consults in critical care units (by Weissman on 01/31/2009)
Hello--everey program is a bit different, but I would guess that a mature program is seeing 20-40% or more of it's volume from ICUs--some programs start in the ICU and thus have very high percentages. As to reason, by far the most common is to help with goals of care. The intake is done by differently by different services, but most common would be physician or advance practice nurse. There is no national data on # of follow-up visits for ICU patients, a good rule of thumb for all pall. care consults is to expect an average of 3 follow-ups per patient, if the team, as part of their practice, does follow-ups. Some programs do one-time visits only (some of the Kaiser hospitals).
I'm not sure I understand the billing component of your question.

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