News From the End of Life: Report discusses changes to improve EOL care
May 1, 2003
News From the End of Life: Report discusses changes to improve EOL care
Limited resources must be targeted appropriately
A new report, "Financing End-of-Life Care: Challenges for an Aging Population," explores key end-of-life issues, including changing financial incentives to treat disease aggressively at end of life.
The report outlines the current public and private financing systems for end-of-life care and suggests ways that these systems could be updated and improved. For example, it discusses how to build on the success of the 20-year-old Medicare hospice benefit. The report also suggests that the financial incentives for hospitals and physicians related to end-of-life care be redirected away from aggressive inpatient medicine and toward rewards for providing palliative care and consultative services outside the acute care setting.
"Integrating the major end-of-life funding sources may offer at least one solution for providing comprehensive, cost-efficient, high-quality care," says Bonnie J. Austin, JD, coauthor of the report. "Policy intervention is needed to ensure that limited resources are targeted appropriately."