Emergency Department Embedded Palliative Care Service Creates Value for Health Systems
Emergency department (ED)-initiated palliative care consultation facilitates goal-concordant care while stewarding resource utilization. Delivery models are being piloted without clear operational and financial sustainability. Authors of this study in the Journal of Palliative Medicine embedded a palliative care consultation service at a 350-bed urban community hospital with 45,000 annual ED visits. They found that it was clinically meaningful, operationally viable, and delivered a 6.7x ROI.