Association of Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment Form Use With End-of-Life Care Quality Metrics in Patients With Cancer

Purpose:Many patients with advanced cancer receive aggressive treatment near the end of life. The Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) form is an innovation that converts patient preferences into medical orders. We compared the end-of-life care of patients with advanced cancer who had completed POLST forms with that of patients who had advance directives (ADs).Methods:We studied 2,159 West Virginians with ADs and/or POLST forms in the West Virginia e-Directive Registry who died as a result of cancer between January 2011 and February 2016. Data from the Vital Registration Office (date, site, and cause of death) were merged with those from the registry (form type, completion date, and hospice admission). The primary outcome variables were out-of-hospital death (OHD) and hospice admission.Results:The percentage of patients with OHD was 85.7% for patients with POLST forms compared with 72.0% for those with ADs (P < .001). The odds of OHD for patients with POLST forms were 2.33 times those of...