Triggered Palliative Care Consults: A Systematic Review of Interventions for Hospitalized and Emergency Department Patients.

Context: Palliative care improves the quality of care and may reduce utilization, but delays or the absences of such services are common and costly in inpatient and emergency department settings. Triggered palliative care consults (PCCs) offer one way to identify patients who would benefit from palliative care and to connect them with services early in their course. Consensus reports recommend use of triggers to identify patients for PCC, but no standards exist to guide trigger design or implementation.

Objectives: To conduct a systematic review of published trigger tools for PCC.

Methods: Studies included quality improvement and prospective analyses of triggers for PCC for adults in the emergency department and inpatient settings since 2008. Paired reviewers evaluated the studies for inclusion criteria and extracted data related to study demographics, trigger processes, trigger criteria, and study bias.

Results: The search yielded 5773 citations. Twenty studies were included for final analysis with more than 17,000 patients represented. Trigger processes and composition were heterogeneous, although frequently used categories, such as cancer, dementia, and chronic comorbidities, were identified. Three-quarters of the studies were deemed to have moderate or high risk of bias.

Conclusion: We present a range of trigger tools spanning different hospital settings and patient populations. Common themes in implementation and content arose, but the limitations of these studies are notable, and further rigorous randomized comparisons are needed to generate standards of care. In addition, future studies should focus on developing triggers that identify patients requiring primary-level vs. specialty-level palliative care.