Physician Characteristics Strongly Predict Patient Enrollment In Hospice.

ABSTRACT: Individual physicians are widely believed to play a large role in patients' decisions about end-of-life care, but little empirical evidence supports this view. We developed a novel method for measuring the relationship between physician characteristics and hospice enrollment, in a nationally representative sample of Medicare patients. We focused on patients who died with a diagnosis of poor-prognosis cancer in the period 2006-11, for whom palliative treatment and hospice would be considered the standard of care. We found that the proportion of a physician's patients who were enrolled in hospice was a strong predictor of whether or not that physician's other patients would enroll in hospice. The magnitude of this association was larger than that of other known predictors of hospice enrollme

SUBMITTER: Obermeyer Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4852702 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature