Palliative Care Clinician Overestimation of Survival in Advanced Cancer: Disparities and Association With End-of-Life Care.

Context: Clinicians frequently overestimate survival time in serious illness.

Objective: The objective of this study was to understand the frequency of overestimation in palliative care (PC) and the relation with end-of-life (EOL) treatment.

Methods: This is a multisite cohort study of 230 hospitalized patients with advanced cancer who consulted with PC between 2013 and 2016.

Feeling Heard and Understood: A Patient-Reported Quality Measure for the Inpatient Palliative Care Setting.

Context: As endorsed by the palliative care "Measuring What Matters" initiative, capturing patients' direct assessment of their care is essential for ongoing quality reporting and improvement. Fostering an environment where seriously ill patients feel heard and understood is of crucial importance to modern health care.

Objectives: To describe the development and performance of a self-report field measure for seriously ill patients to report how well they feel heard and understood in the hospital environment.

Design of, and enrollment in, the palliative care communication research initiative: a direct-observation cohort study.

Background: Understanding the characteristics of communication that foster patient-centered outcomes amid serious illness are essential for the science of palliative care. However, epidemiological cohort studies that directly observe clinical conversations can be challenging to conduct in the natural setting. We describe the successful enrollment, observation and data collection methods of the ongoing Palliative Care Communication Research Initiative (PCCRI).