Impact of home-based palliative care on health care costs and hospital use: A systematic review.

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of home-based palliative care (HBPC) on reducing hospital visits and whether HBPC lowered health care cost.

Method: We searched six bibliographic databases (Embase (Ovid); Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials; Medline (Ovid); PubMed; Web of Science Core Collection; and, CINAHL) until February 2019 and performed a narrative synthesis of our findings.

Results: Of the 1,426 identified references, 21 articles based on 19 unique studies met our inclusion criteria, which involved 92,000 participants.