Findings of a major new study of hospice care in America show that hospice services save money for Medicare and bring quality care to patients with life-limiting illness and their families, according to a release from Kaua‘i Hospice.
The study from Duke University appears in the October 2007 issue of the professional journal Social Science & Medicine.
Study highlights include:
• Hospice reduced Medicare costs by an average of $2,309 per hospice patient.
• Use of hospice decreased Medicare expenditures for cancer patients until the 233rd day of care and until the 153rd day of care for non-cancer patients.
• Increasing length of hospice use by just three days would increase savings due to hospice by nearly 10 percent, from around $2,300 to $2,500 per hospice user.
• Medicare costs would be reduced for seven out of 10 hospice recipients if hospice has been used for a longer period of time.
“Hospice helps people live with dignity, comfort and compassion and brings needed support to family caregivers — to know definitively that it provides a cost savings to Medicare is an additional benefit,” Ken Zeri, Kokua Mau president and Hospice Hawai‘i president, said in a press release.
“Given that hospice has been widely demonstrated to improve quality of life of patients and families … the Medicare program appears to have a rare situation whereby something that improves quality of life also appears to reduce costs,” writes lead author Don H. Taylor Jr., assistant professor of public policy at Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy, according to the release.
The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization reports that 1.3 million patients received hospice care across the U.S. in 2006. Approximately 35 percent of all deaths in the U.S. were under the care of a hospice program.
Local hospices provided care for nearly 2,200 individuals and their families last year. There are eight hospices on the islands of O‘ahu, Kaua‘i, Maui and Moloka‘i celebrating National Hospice and Palliative Care Month in November.
For more information on hospice, end-of-life, palliative and early advance care planning, call Kaua‘i Hospice at 245-7277 or visit www.kauaihospice.org
