Healthy Aging & Clinical Care in the Elderly

Palliative care, and more specifically end-of-life (EOL) care, serves to address the physical, practical, psychosocial, and spiritual needs of dying patients and their families. The quality of this care is critical to reduce the burden of illness and moderate escalating health-care costs. Accordingly, assessing the quality of EOL care is a priority of many governments. This article is an overview of the three main types of data sources that can be used to indicate the quality of EOL care: population-based administrative data, clinical data, and patient-reported outcomes. Existing administrative data are relatively inexpensive to use and provide a whole picture of the health-care system. Clinical data are useful for benchmarking care provided against best practices. Patient-reported outcome measures capture quality as defined by the patient and directly represent impact of care. Understanding the capabilities of these data types is the basis for developing feasible quality assessments to inform program and policy development.