PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] A study published Feb. 6 in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that while more seniors are dying with hospice care than a decade ago, they are increasingly doing so for very few days right after being in intensive care. The story told by the data, said the study's lead author, is that for many seniors palliative care happens only as an afterthought.
"For many patients, hospice is an 'add-on' to a very aggressive pattern of care during the last days of life," said Dr. Joan Teno, professor of health services policy and practice in the Public Health Program at Brown University and a palliative care physician at Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island. "I suspect this is not what patients want."
The findings of Teno and her co-authors come from their analysis of the Medicare fee-for-service records of more than 840,000 people aged 66 or older who died in 2000, 2005, or 2009. They looked at where seniors died, what medical services were provided during their last 90 days of life, and how long they received them.
Over the course of the decade, hospice and hospital-based palliative care teams have made major inroads in the health care system, essentially becoming mainstream. But a deeper analysis of patients' histories in the data, Teno said, shows that in many cases the fee-for-service system still fell short of ensuring the full measure of comfort and psychological support that hospice is meant to provide dying seniors.
Data on dying
For example, while the proportion of dying seniors using hospice care increased to 42.2 percent in 2009 from 21.6 percent in 2000, the proportion who were in intensive care in the last month of life also increased to 29.2 percent in 2009 from 24.3 percent in 2000. More than a quarter of hospice use in 2009, 28.4 percent, was for three days or less, and 40 percent of those late referrals came after a hospitalization with an
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| Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University Source:Eurekalert |