NPR Health Shots covers Arcadia’s end of life analysis
At Arcadia, we believe that end of life care can make a meaningful difference for individual patients, and for population health management. As our chief medical officer Rich Parker, MD tells our team: the reason to do end of life care is that it is the right thing to do for the patient – but when end of life care is done correctly, a side effect is reduced utilization and cost.
NPR’s Alison Kodjak interviewed Dr. Parker about our team’s analysis of end of life care using Medicaid claims data. We found that dying in a hospital is about seven times more expensive than dying at home, and – as many of us in healthcare intuitively understand – dying in a hospital means experiencing significantly more intense services.
“This intensity of services in the hospital shows a lot of suffering that is not probably in the end going to offer people more quality of life and may not offer them more quantity of life either,” Dr. Parker told Kodjack.