Hospital Palliative Care Impact Calculator

After you enter your data, look at Section 2 to see where your current statistics place your program. What quartile are you in for staffing? For penetration? Are they reasonably matched, or are they two quartiles apart? Consider using Section 1 and doing a three-year version, projecting staffing and volume for the next two years. What quartile are you in each year? How do your costs change? Your impact or savings? How can you use this to discuss and prioritize the use of your team, and focus on specific patient populations or performance metrics such as “time from admission to consult”? This provides perspective and comparative data. Use the calculations to help you plan specific local actions.

You can estimate annual admissions using the following shortcut:

[(Staffed Beds x 365 days) * Average Occupancy Rate] / Average Length of Stay = Estimate of Admissions

See Section 5, Estimates of Direct Cost Savings for Inpatient Palliative Care Consult Services, for additional detail. The $3,237 per case savings (May et al, 2018) is a statistically significant reduction in direct costs from an analysis of more than 133,000 cases of patients with and without palliative care. It is based on well-developed palliative care programs providing consultations completed within the first three days of hospital admission. This was an important characteristic to be able to compare the direct cost of the total inpatient stay to the cost of a patient without palliative care.

The Impact Calculator helps demonstrate the likely impact of cost savings related to patient volume and investment in services. These savings are spread across numerous cost budgets in the hospital. Look at the difference between cost savings per patient and staffing costs per patient in Section 1. Savings should significantly exceed costs and provide a basis for discussions about current and future budget investments to maintain quality care. The data in Section 2 should help you see how your program compares to others in patient volume and staff size, to also help plan forward.

CAPC members have access to recurring Virtual Office Hours on demonstrating value through measurement, and tools and technical assistance on financing and making the case for palliative care.

CAPC members can download our customizable Hospital Impact Calculator to input their own operations in Excel—staffing and salaries, total patients seen, initial and follow-up visit mix, and local billing rates—to estimate the total financial impact of their hospital’s palliative care team. Specifically, the customizable calculator estimates the hospital’s direct cost savings and billing revenue, net of expenses.

Palliative care champions can use this tool to advocate for resources and new initiatives, and can consider some of the embedded comparisons to national averages as they work to continuously improve operations.