Hui, DavidNortje, NicoHuang, Yu-Ting2024-11-202024-11-202024Hui, D., Huang, Y.T., Andersen, C., Cassel, B., Nortje, N., George, M. and Bruera, E., 2024. Cost of Hospitalization Associated with Inpatient Goals-of-Care Program Implementation at a Comprehensive Cancer Center: A Propensity Score Analysis. Cancers, 16(7), p.1316.https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers16071316https://hdl.handle.net/10566/19704The impact of goals-of-care programs on acute hospitalization costs is unclear. We compared the hospitalization cost in an 8-month period before implementation of a multimodal interdisciplinary goals-of-care program (1 May 2019 to 31 December 2019) to an 8-month period after program implementation (1 May 2020 to 31 December 2020). Propensity score weighting was used to adjust for differences in potential covariates. The primary outcome was total direct cost during the hospital stay for each index hospitalization. This analysis included 6977 patients in 2019 and 5964 patients in 2020. The total direct cost decreased by 3% in 2020 but was not statistically significant (ratio 0.97, 95% CI 0.92, 1.03). Under individual categories, there was a significant decrease in medical oncology (ratio 0.58, 95% CI 0.50, 0.68) and pharmacy costs (ratio 0.86, 95% CI 0.79, 0.96), and an increase in room and board (ratio 1.06, 95% CI 1.01, 1.10). In subgroup analysis, ICU patients had a significant reduction in total direct cost after program implementation (ratio 0.83, 95% CI 0.72, 0.94).encommunicationhealthcare costsintensive care unitsneoplasmspalliative careArticle