Promoting excellence in end-of-life care: a report on innovative models of palliative care

Abstract

Background: Promoting Excellence in End-of Life Care, a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, funded 22 demonstration projects representing a wide range of health care settings and patient populations to develop innovative models for delivering pal-liative care that addressed documented deficiencies in the care of patients and families fac-ing the final stage of life. Objective: To determine the practicality (feasibility of development and operation as well as acceptance by stakeholders) of new models of care and to determine the impact of the mod-els on access to, quality of and financing for palliative care. Design: The program cannot report scientifically rigorous outcomes, but the grant-funded projects used a variety of methods and measures to assess acceptance of new models and their impact from the perspectives of various stakeholders, including patients and their families, clinicians, administrators and payers. While it is not possible to aggregate data across proj-ects, the data reported to the Promoting Excellence national program office were used to de-scribe program impact with respect to the practicality of palliative care service integratio