The Business Case for Palliative Care

Palliative care improves clinical outcomes at lower costs. Even so, clinical and administrative healthcare leaders need to understand local practices and outcomes when making program-development decisions. Before you build a business plan for palliative care, you must understand the business of palliative care. This self-paced, online course is where you can start. Many of those who have taken this course, bring multiple team members together and utilize the dialogue generated as the foundation for the business plan of their palliative care strategy.

Data describing how patients with serious illnesses are currently utilizing healthcare services, associated costs and revenues, and how your organization is performing on quality measures influence decisions about the need to create, sustain or expand palliative care. This four-hour, self-paced course can help with all these critical tasks. Designed to orient clinical and administrative leaders to the concepts that inform the business case for palliative care, it introduces the analyses that can be used to assess the impact of existing programs and identify growth opportunities for hospital, clinic, and home-based palliative care services.

Developed by a nationally recognized team of clinicians and analysts, the course provides a roadmap for gathering the data needed to make the case for creating, sustaining or expanding your palliative care services.

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What You’ll Learn

• Review of the components, models, and prevalence of palliative care across the continuum, including community-based (outpatient) and inpatient palliative care services
• Current evidence of palliative care impact on patients and families, and on utilization and costs
• Key concepts that inform the business case for different types of palliative care services in different settings, appreciating where fiscal and quality incentives are aligned
• Review of analytic approaches used to develop fiscal outcomes for palliative care
• Guidance on how to develop ROI estimates that account for staffing costs, expected revenues, and avoided costs
• Tips for developing a comprehensive case for palliative care that addresses the goals of improving outcomes, improving care delivery and reducing costs

What You’ll Earn

4 continuing education (CE) credits approved by the following accreditation bodies:

• CEs are provided through California State University San Marcos, accredited by the Western Association of  Schools and Colleges (WASC).

Course Authors

Kathleen Kerr, BA – Ms. Kerr is a health care consultant with expertise in palliative care, quality improvement and program evaluation. Her particular area of interest is developing feasible, meaningful methods for assessing financial outcomes, with the goal of promoting the growth and sustainability of clinical services. A long-time faculty member of the Palliative Care Leadership Center at UCSF, she brings to the current project more than a decade of experience supporting the development of inpatient palliative care services. She currently serves as Co-Director of the Metrics Team for the Palliative Care Action Community, an effort sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation aimed at promoting the development, sustainability and growth of community-based palliative care services across California.

J. Brian Cassel, PhD – Dr. Cassel is Assistant Professor in the division of Hematology/Oncology and Palliative Care, and Director of Analytic Services at Massey Cancer Center, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. His research interests include cancer informatics, and health services research on specialist palliative care services in the US and the UK, specifically the costs and financing of cancer care and palliative care.

Michael W. Rabow, MD: Dr. Rabow is a Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, at the University of California, San Francisco. Board-certified in internal medicine and hospice & palliative care, Dr. Rabow directs a leading outpatient palliative care co-management program– the Symptom Management Service—at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is a national expert in outpatient palliative care research and service delivery, and conducted one of the few controlled trials to date of outpatient palliative care consultation, as well as multiple surveys of current outpatient palliative care consultation practices nationally.

Shelley R. Adler, PhD: Dr. Adler is a Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, where she serves as Director of Education and holds the Osher Foundation Endowed Chair in Education in Integrative Medicine. Dr. Adler is also Director of Education at Zen Hospice Project. She was trained in medical anthropology, sociocultural gerontology, and medical education research.

Completion and Refunds

In order to complete this course and obtain a certificate, you must view the course in its entirety, correctly answer all case studies and quiz/test questions (as appropriate) and complete the evaluation. You will have 90 days to access this course from the date of purchase. No refunds are given for self-paced courses.