National trends in end of life care for veterans with advanced cancer.
Smith, CEP; Coke, P; Kluger, M; Kamal, A; Kelley, MJ
Published in: Journal of Clinical Oncology
3 Background: It is imperative to provide quality end of life (EOL) care for cancer patients. This entails minimizing aggressive measures at the EOL. Although rates of hospice utilization within the Veteran’s Health Administration have improved, chemotherapy administration and intensive care unit (ICU) admission at the EOL, indicators of aggressive care, are not clearly declining over recent years. Methods: We identified 32,665 veterans diagnosed with stage IV lung, colorectal, or pancreatic cancer who died between 2009-2016 using VA cancer registry and Corporate Data Warehouse data through a novel EOL Dashboard Tool, which has been validated at multiple VA sites. This EOL tool reports three indicators; incidence of chemotherapy use in the last 14 days of life, ICU admission in the last 30 days of life and hospice admission or consult. Change over time, 2009-2016, was assessed using a repeated measures one-way ANOVA with post hoc test for linear trend of time for individual cancers and two-way ANOVA for all cancers combined. Results: Chemotherapy use in the last 14 days of life declined from 6.8% in 2009 to 4.4% in 2016 (p < 0.05). ICU admission in the last 30 days did not change significantly, from 13.3% in 2009 to 14.7% in 2016. The exception was stage IV lung cancer patients in whom ICU admissions increased from 12.9% to 16.2% (p = 0.01). Patients utilizing hospice services increased from 32.4% to 52.6% (p < 0.01). When combined for all years in an unadjusted analysis by VA regional network (VISN), chemotherapy use ranged geographically from 4.2% to 8.1% and for ICU admission from 8.4% to 18.0%. Conclusions: While chemotherapy administration at the EOL is declining for veterans with stage IV cancer, ICU admissions are unchanged and becoming more common in stage IV lung cancer despite increasing hospice utilization. Compared to prior Medicare reports, veterans have similar rates of EOL chemotherapy use and fewer EOL ICU admissions, adding to a growing body of literature showing that despite veterans having poorer health and utilizing more medical resources, the VA performs at or above non-veteran health care institutions on end of life cancer care. There is notable geographic variation in aggressive EOL care.
