Usability and Acceptability of the QDACT-PC, an Electronic Point-of-Care System for Standardized Quality Monitoring in Palliative Care.

Context: Few resources exist to support collaborative quality monitoring in palliative care. These tools, if proven efficient through technology-enabled methods, may begin to routinize data collection on quality during usual palliative care delivery. Usability testing is a common approach to assess how easily and effectively users can interact with a newly developed tool.

Symptom Burden and Performance Status among Community-Dwelling Patients with Serious Illness.

Background: Predicting when burdensome symptoms will arise or worsen is important to preserving quality of life in patients with serious illness.

Objectives: We explored the relationship between prevalence and severity of symptoms and underlying performance status.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort analysis of patients receiving community palliative care, investigating relationships between symptom burden and performance status.

Quality of palliative care for patients with advanced cancer in a community consortium.

Background: Measuring quality of care delivery is essential to palliative care program growth and sustainability. We formed the Carolinas Consortium for Palliative Care and collected a quality data registry to monitor our practice and inform quality improvement efforts.

Measures: We analyzed all palliative care consultations in patients with cancer in our quality registry from March 2008 through October 2011 using 18 palliative care quality measures.

Conformance with supportive care quality measures is associated with better quality of life in patients with cancer receiving palliative care.

Purpose: As palliative care further integrates into cancer care, descriptions of how supportive care quality measures improve patient outcomes are necessary to establish best practices.

Methods: We assessed the relationship between conformance to 18 palliative care quality measures and quality of life from data obtained using our novel point-of-care, electronic quality monitoring system, the Quality Data Collection Tool for Palliative Care (QDACT-PC). All patients with cancer from January 2008 through March 2011 seen in the Carolinas Palliative Care Consortium were evaluated for demographic, disease, prognostic, performance status, and measure conformance variables.