Financial Implications of Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care
Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care recently released its newest monograph, "Financial Implications of Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care," featuring six innovative demonstration projects that successfully provide concurrent life-extending and palliative care for patients with chronic and life-limiting illnesses. These projects not only demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and its acceptability to patients and clinicians; they also show its potential for containing costs. The first project in the 32 page monograph is the Palliative Care Program, a University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospice of Michigan partnership funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. John Finn, chief medical director for the Maggie Allesee Center for Quality of Life was the co-principle investigator of the project. Turn to pages 8 - 10 to read in detail the financial implications our project demonstrated.

The monograph complements a Policy Directions Forum held in Washington on September 9, 2002 co-sponsored by Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). The theme of the day was a call to Congress to implement larger, regional, population-based demonstration projects to validate the findings of these small innovative programs.