The last 90 days of life are often the costliest for cancer care, as frequency of ER visits and hospitalizations increase. To address this, leading oncology practices have begun to reconsider aggressive therapy in advanced stages of illness when the possibility of clinical benefit is highly remote and instead refer appropriate patients to hospice or palliative care programs, which studies have shown both reduce resource utilization and improve quality of life.
To optimize the use of end-of-life resources, one prominent Oncology Care Model (OCM) participant leveraged Integra Connect’s End of Life Predictive Model dashboard to identify which patients were most likely to be candidates for palliative care or hospice based on the specifics of their disease state and treatment plan.
The result: 54 percent increase in patients with 3 or more days of hospice and a 17 percent reduction in total cost of care in final 30 days of life.