Home-Based Palliative Care and Its Influence on Quality of Life in Patients With a Life-Limiting Condition.

The need for comprehensive palliative care is inevitable with the aging population. Incorporating home-based palliative care is a new frontier within healthcare. The purpose of this study was to embed home-based palliative care services within the visiting nursing association (VNA) at a health system in Pennsylvania, examining effect on quality of life and symptom control, and average number of hospital admission days.

Utilization of a Visit-Based Sepsis Assessment to Prevent Hospital Readmissions.

Sepsis results in 270,000 deaths annually in the United States. Despite the current healthcare focus on sepsis, there exist few postacute best-practice standards to rapidly identify health changes in home healthcare patients to prevent and reduce hospital readmissions due to sepsis. We systematically examined whether an evidence-based process and intervention triggering home healthcare clinicians to activate a Positive Sepsis Assessment would reduce the likelihood that the patient would be readmitted to the acute care hospital.