Can Reimagined Hospice Combine Medical Care With Support In Dying?

After a half-century as a Medicare benefit, hospice care still has had only limited success in improving the quality of patients’ lives as they approach their deaths. While more people are enrolling in hospice (about 1.7 million in 2020), they often do so only days before dying. Thus, they fail to benefit from the best of what hospice has to offer.

As a result, there is increasing interest in new end-of-life care models. One would provide concurrent care that would combine some ongoing treatment for a patent’s underlying disease with end-of-life support. The idea: Encourage more—and quicker—hospice enrollment among those who often reject the benefit because they are “not ready to give up.”