Triggered Palliative Care Consults: A Systematic Review of Interventions for Hospitalized and Emergency Department Patients

Abstract Context Palliative care improves the quality of care and may reduce utilization, but delays or absences of such services are common and costly in inpatient and Emergency Department (ED) settings. Triggered palliative care consults (PCC) offer one way to identify patients who would benefit from palliative care and to connect them with services early in their course. Consensus reports recommend use of triggers to identify patients for PCC, but no standards exist to guide trigger design or implementation. Objective To conduct a systematic review of published trigger tools for PCC. Methods: Studies included quality improvement and prospective analyses of triggers for PCC for adults in the ED and inpatient settings since 2008. Paired reviewers evaluated the studies for inclusion criteria and extracted data related to study demographics, trigger processes, trigger criteria, and study bias. Results The search yielded 5,773 citations. Twenty studies were included for final analysis with over 17,000 patients represented. Trigger processes and composition were heterogeneous, although frequently utilized categories such as cancer, dementia, and chronic comorbidities were identified. Three quarters of the studies were deemed to have moderate or high risk of bias. Conclusion We present a range of trigger tools spanning different hospital settings and patient populations. Common themes in implementation and content arose but the limitations of these studies are notable and further rigorous randomized comparisons are needed to generate standards of care. Additionally, future studies should focus on developing triggers that identify patients requiring primary versus specialty level palliative care.