Economic Aspects of Hospital Inpatient Palliative Care

Hospitalization costs represent the main component of costs for persons with serious illness across high-income countries and consequently are a subject of considerable policy interest. In terms of cost-effectiveness, there is high-quality evidence that hospital palliative care improves quality of life and pain management for patients with serious illness. There is more mixed evidence on how the interventions impact costs, with notable variance in treatment effect estimates by study design and research context. Priorities for future research include improving the causal credibility of cost-effect estimates, improving identification of palliative care needs following acute hospital admission, and conducting comparative evaluation of different models of inpatient care.