Stakeholder Priorities in the COVID-19 Era

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Ensuring organizational readiness for patient/family communications, and for effective symptom management (via direct clinical services and by providing education and clinical tools to colleagues, such as goals of care conversation scripts)
  • Health systems, hospitals, and specialty practices benefit
• Ensuring that care plans are in place for high-risk/high-need patients, and that their needs are proactively addressed (to avoid crises and minimize avoidable contact with health care system)
  • Health plans, long-term care organizations, and at-risk provider organizations benefit
• Ensuring Emergency Department through-put
  • Health systems and hospitals benefit

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Ensuring optimal use and through-put of intensive care, enabling continued critical care admissions and managing expenses
• Impacting direct costs per admission, including reducing length-of-stay for complex patients. Savings can be roughly $3,000 per admission (compared to a palliative care team cost of less than $1,000 per admission).
• Expediting appropriate admission to hospice (important for hospitals), and improving hospice length-of-stay (important for hospices and health plans)
• Demonstrating good stewardship of resources through staff productivity and appropriate billing practices
• Potentially reducing malpractice claims by improving patient, family, and care team shared decision-making

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Improving surgical team productivity by handling difficult conversations
• Improving surgical team job satisfaction
• Improving patient and family satisfaction

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Improving Emergency Department staff productivity (palliative care can expedite decision-making by handling difficult conversations, and assist in triaging patients to the right bed type or setting)
• Improving ED team job satisfaction
• Improving patient and family satisfaction

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Bolstering clinicians through skilled emotional support
• Reducing moral distress and confusion by clarifying and aligning patient and family goals

Palliative care can contribute to clinician well-being (important for organizations concerned about clinician burnout and associated turnover).

Palliative care contributes value by:

• Reducing re-admissions by clarifying care plans, addressing symptom distress and/or responding to crises
• Reducing avoidable ED visits and hospitalization through same approach

For health plans, hospitals with a high uninsured and/or Medicaid payer mix, and organizations with significant risk contracts, reducing avoidable utilization is of high importance - and a key value proposition for palliative care teams.