Home-based palliative care study: site of death, and costs of medical care for patients with congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer.

Purpose: To examine differences in site of death and costs of services by primary diagnosis for patients receiving home-based palliative care as compared to usual care at the end of life.

Design And Methods: A nonequivalent group design was employed with 298 terminally ill patients diagnosed with cancer, CHF, or COPD enrolled. The treatment group received an interdisciplinary home-based palliative care program and the comparison group received usual Kaiser Permanente services.

Physicians as medical center "extenders" in end-of-life care: physician home visits as the lynch pin in creating an end-of-life care system.

The article reviews a successful community-based end-of-life home care program. Specifically, physician visits were compared in the models of care studied, and it was concluded that the community-based model patients benefited significantly over the standard model of care patients due to the use of physicians.