Improving Quality of Care for Seriously Ill Patients: Opportunities for Hospitalists

Improving Satisfaction

Shifting to value-based payment means that the patient and family experience determine an increasingly large percentage of hospital and provider reimbursement. Palliative care approaches, such as family caregiver assessment and support, access to 24/7 assistance after discharge, and person-centered care by an interdisciplinary team, improve performance in all of these measures. Communication skills training improves patient satisfaction scores, and skilled discussions about achievable priorities for care are associated with better quality of life, reduced nonbeneficial and burdensome treatments, and an increase in goal-concordant care.¹⁹ Communication skills training has also been shown to reduce burnout and improve empathy among physicians.^28,29

Though more evidence is needed to understand the impact of primary palliative care provision by hospitalists, the strong evidence on the benefits of specialty palliative care suggests that the skilled provision of primary palliative care by hospitalists will result in higher quality, higher value care. A number of training options exist for midcareer hospital medicine clinicians, including both in-person and online training in communication and other palliative care skills.

• The Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) is a membership organization that offers online continuing education unit and continuing medical education courses on communication skills, pain and symptom management, caregiver support, and care coordination. CAPC also offers courses on palliative interventions for patients with dementia, COPD, and heart failure.
• SHM is actively invested in engaging hospitalists in palliative care skills training. SHM provides free toolkits on a variety of topics within the palliative care domain, including pain management, postacute care transitions, and opioid safety. The recently released Serious Illness Communication toolkit offers background on the role of hospitalists in palliative care provision, a pathway for fitting goals-of-care conversations into hospitalist workflow and recommended metrics and training resources. SHM also uses a mentored implementation model in which expert physicians mentor hospital team members on best practices in palliative care. SHM’s Palliative Care Task Force seeks to identify educational activities for hospitalists and create opportunities to integrate palliative care in hospital medicine.³⁰
• The Serious Illness Care Program at Ariadne Labs in Boston aims to facilitate conversations between clinicians and seriously ill patients through its Serious Illness Conversation Guide, combined with technical assistance on workflow redesign to help clinicians conduct and document serious illness conversations.
• VitalTalk specializes in clinical communication education. Through online and in-person train-the-trainer programs, VitalTalk equips clinicians to lead communication training programs at their home institutions.
• The Education in Palliative and End-of-Life Care Program and End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) uses a train-the-trainer approach to educate providers in palliative care clinical competencies and increase the reach of primary palliative care provision. ELNEC workshops are complemented by a curriculum of online clinical training modules.

Though palliative care skills training is a necessary first step, hospitalists also cite lack of time, difficulty finding records of previous patient discussions, and frequent handoffs as among the barriers to integrating palliative care into their practice.¹⁰ Studies examining the process of palliative care and hospital culture change have found that barriers to palliative care integration include a culture of aggressive care in EDs, lack of standardized patient identification criteria, and limited knowledge about and staffing for palliative care.³¹ These data indicate the need for system changes that enable hospitalists to operationalize palliative care principles.

Health systems must implement systems and processes that routinize palliative care, making it part of the mainstream course of care for seriously ill patients and their caregivers. This includes developing systems for the identification of patients with palliative care needs, embedding palliative care assessment and referral into clinical workflows, and enabling standardized palliative care documentation in electronic medical records. While palliative care skills training is essential, investment in systems change is no less critical to embedding palliative care practices in clinical norms across specialties.

Hospitalists can use a palliative approach to improve care quality and quality of life for seriously ill patients while helping to avoid preventable and unnecessary 911 calls, ED visits, and hospitalizations. The shift towards value-based payment is a strong incentive for hospitals and hospitalists to direct resources toward practices that improve the quality of life and care for the highest-need patients and their families. When equipped with the tools they need to provide palliative care, either themselves or in collaboration with palliative care teams, hospitalists have the opportunity to profoundly redirect the experience of care for seriously ill patients and their families.