Acute Care Utilization and Place of Death among Patients Discharged from an Inpatient Palliative Care Unit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Discharging patients from inpatient palliative care units to the community is aligned with patients' desires to be cared for and die at home. However, there is little research examining patient outcomes after discharge. Objective: To describe the outcomes of patients discharged from an inpatient palliative care unit. Design: A single-institution retrospective cohort study using medical record data linked to regional acute care hospital and home care data. Setting/Participants: Patients ( n = 75) discharged to the community over a one-year period from a 31-bed inpatient palliative care unit in an academic continuing care facility. Measurements: Survival, postdischarge hospitalizations and emergency department visits, and place of death. Results: Patients discharged to the community had poor prognosis. Over one-third had a discharge Palliative Performance Score <50. The median survival after discharge was 96 days, and 36% of decedent patients died in an acute care hospital. Thirteen percent of patients were hospitalized, and 23% visited an emergency department within 30 days of discharge, often for reasons that could have been managed in the community. Certain groups of patients were at greater risk of acute care use and in-hospital deaths, including younger patients, patients with nonmalignant diseases, and patients discharged home or retirement home, compared to long-term care settings. Conclusions: Patients discharged from an inpatient palliative care setting are at risk of postdischarge hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and in-hospital deaths, despite having community supports in place. Variations in outcomes can point to groups of patients who may require greater intensity of supports postdischarge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".