Palliative care and cost savings

Drew Rosielle talks about a recent study showing that patients who received palliative care consults were associated with cost savings.

In addition to providing specialized, compassionate, end-of-life care, there is also an economic benefit.

However, I’m not sure how much to tout this. Palliative care already comes at a difficult time for the family, and associating cost savings with this probably isn’t the best way to promote the specialty:

If it ‘gets out’ that we’re also the save-The-Man-some-money via stopping medical treatment – people may mistrust us some more. I’m not too worried about this: there’s tons of evidence that PC consultation improves patient/family-centric outcomes too, and I think most of my patients/families are happy we’re involved in the long run, but this is not necessarily a message we need to broadcast from the mountain top.