Top Ten Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Leveraging the Electronic Health Record for Data Collection and Quality Improvement.

As palliative care (PC) programs rapidly grow and expand across settings, the need to measure, improve, and standardize high-quality PC has also grown. The electronic health record (EHR) is a key component of these efforts as a central hub of care delivery and a repository of patient and system data. Deliberate efforts to leverage the EHR for PC quality improvement (QI) can help PC programs and health systems improve care for patients with serious illnesses.

Long-term opioid use in patients treated with head and neck intensity-modulated radiotherapy.

Purpose: Acute and chronic pain during and after radiotherapy is an important driver of poor quality of life. We aimed to identify risk factors associated with increased chronic opioid use in head and neck squamous cell cancer survivors.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort analysis on head and neck squamous cell cancer patients treated with definitive or adjuvant intensity-modulated radiotherapy.

NCCN Guidelines® Insights: Palliative Care, Version 2.2021.

Palliative care has evolved to be an integral part of comprehensive cancer care with the goal of early intervention to improve quality of life and patient outcomes. The NCCN Guidelines for Palliative Care provide recommendations to help the primary oncology team promote the best quality of life possible throughout the illness trajectory for each patient with cancer. The NCCN Palliative Care Panel meets annually to evaluate and update recommendations based on panel members' clinical expertise and emerging scientific data.

Early Palliative Care Is Associated With Reduced Emergency Department Utilization in Pancreatic Cancer.

Objectives: Most patients with pancreatic cancer have high symptom burden and poor outcomes. Palliative care (PC) can improve the quality of care through expert symptom management, although the optimal timing of PC referral is still poorly understood. We aimed to assess the association of early PC on health care utilization and charges of care for pancreatic cancer patients.

Telehealth and Palliative Care for Patients With Cancer: Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

It has been reported that the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection is higher in patients with cancer than in the general population and that patients with cancer are at an increased risk of developing severe life-threatening complications from COVID-19. Increased transmission and poor outcomes noted in emerging data on patients with cancer and COVID-19 call for aggressive isolation and minimization of nosocomial exposure. Palliative care and oncology providers are posed with unique challenges due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

End-of-Life Care in Cystic Fibrosis: Comparing Provider Practices Based on Lung Transplant Candidacy.

The optimal timing to introduce palliative care (PC) and end-of-life (EOL) conversations into the lives of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) has not been established. Compare EOL care practices for people with CF who died without a lung transplant (LT), are living without an LT, and those who received an LT. Retrospective chart review.

Double-balloon endoscopy and Peutz-Jeghers syndrome: a new look at an old disease.

Peutz-Jeghers syndrome is a rare disease characterized by mucocutaneous hyperpigmentation and intestinal hamartomatous polyposis. Life-threatening complications include intestinal obstruction and increased risk of gastrointestinal malignancies. While colonoscopy continues to serve as the gold standard for examination of the colon, newer techniques such as capsule endoscopy and double-balloon endoscopy (DBE) are now being applied to both treatment and surveillance of this disease.