Brief Quality Improvement ReportQuality of Palliative Care for Patients With Advanced Cancer in a Community Consortium

BackgroundMeasuring quality of care delivery is essential to palliative care program growth and sustainability. We formed the Carolinas Consortium for Palliative Care and collected a quality data registry to monitor our practice and inform quality improvement efforts.MeasuresWe analyzed all palliative care consultations in patients with cancer in our quality registry from March 2008 through October 2011 using 18 palliative care quality measures. Descriptive metric adherence was calculated after analyzing the relevant population for measurement.InterventionWe used a paper-based, prospective method to monitor adherence for quality measures in a community-based palliative care consortium.OutcomesWe demonstrate that measures evaluating process assessment (range 63%-100%), as opposed to interventions (range 3%-17%), are better documented.Conclusions/Lessons LearnedAnalyzing data on quality is feasible and valuable in community-based palliative care. Overall, processes to collect data on quality using nontechnology methods may underestimate true adherence to quality measures.