Hospice Care in Assisted Living Facilities Versus at Home: Results of a Multisite Cohort Study.

Objectives: To compare residents of assisted living facilities receiving hospice with people receiving hospice care at home.

Design: Electronic health record-based retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Nonprofit hospices in the Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness network.

Can hospices predict which patients will die within six months?

Objective: To determine whether it is possible to predict, at the time of hospice enrollment, which patients will die within 6 months.

Design: Electronic health record-based retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Patients admitted to 10 hospices in the CHOICE network (Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness).

Are advance directives associated with better hospice care?

Objectives: To describe individuals with advance directives at the time of hospice enrollment and to determine whether they have patterns of care and outcomes that are different from those of individuals without advance directives.

Design: Electronic health record-based retrospective cohort study with propensity score-adjusted analysis.

Setting: Three hospice programs in the United States.

Survival after dialysis discontinuation and hospice enrollment for ESRD.

Background And Objectives: Textbooks report that patients with ESRD survive for 7-10 days after discontinuation of dialysis. Studies describing actual survival are limited, however, and research has not defined patient characteristics that may be associated with longer or shorter survival times. The goals of this study were to determine the mean life expectancy of patients admitted to hospice after discontinuation of dialysis, and to identify independent predictors of survival time.

Can palliative home care reduce 30-day readmissions? Results of a propensity score matched cohort study.

Objective: This study examined the impact of palliative home nursing care on rates of hospital 30-day readmissions.

Methods: The electronic health record based retrospective cohort study was performed within home care and palliative home care programs. Participants were home care patients discharged from one of three urban teaching hospitals.