The economic challenges of palliative medicine
The compelling reasons for palliative care continue to be better symptom management, better advanced care planning and medically appropriate goal setting, and transitions to hospice care. Other new-found compelling reasons include better survival with hospice care, better survival with concurrent palliative care, and lower cost to hospitals and government and insurance funders. In studies to date, hospice and palliative care have been associated with equal or better survival and equal or lower cost. This chapter defines the various types of cost and clinical studies (including cost minimization, cost-effectiveness, cost utility analysis, cost-benefit, cost avoidance) and discusses the available data about the economic challenges of palliative care, how to apply the available data, how to collect and present some useful and useable data, and new directions for research.