Avoided Hospitalization Criteria: Validating the Impact of a Community-Based Palliative Care Program.

This report describes the experiences of a community-based palliative care (CBPC) program's efforts to understand the patterns of hospital utilization, specifically utilization reduction experienced by admitted patients. Efforts to quantify and describe an avoided hospitalization and opportunities to use these data to strengthen partnerships with local insurance payers to assure sustainability of the CBPC will be discussed. Patients with serious chronic illness experience emergency room care and hospitalizations with increasing frequency as their health deteriorates.