MediCaring Home > About MediCaring

MediCaring has worked with nearly one hundred health care organizations to implement effective quality improvement projects in healthcare. MediCaring colleagues have offered expert support to hospitals, nursing homes, health systems, and hospices. We now give our findings and lessons learned freely to all through this web site so that all who aim to improve care for serious illness may succeed.

Sourcebook
Our colleagues literally "wrote the book" on quality improvement for care at the end of life. Read online...

With the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Center directed three successful Breakthrough Series Collaboratives on improving end of life care. Results of previous collaboratives have been published in the authoritative book, Improving Care at the End of Life: A Sourcebook for Clinicians and Managers. Breakthrough improvements achieved by participants included:

We seek to help you make breakthrough change happen in areas that matter to patients and families. A key goal of our activities is to gather information and create a common database that can help improve the experience of dying patients and their families everywhere.

PCPC was formerly known as the Center for Palliative Care Studies (CPCS).

What is MediCaring?

Family at the bedside of a person in hospice careUntil recently, few people survived with serious illness for any substantial period of time. People either died or improved. Now, however, serious chronic illness averages more than a few years at the end of life for Americans. MediCaring is the term we use for the idea that the health care system in the United States could find the patients who are living the end of life with serious and complex illness, tailor services to their priorities, and pay providers in a way that encourages quality care at a price that is tolerable to the community.

Medicare's fractured fee-for-service payment discourages integrated management of end stage disease and encourages acute over palliative treatment. One of the goals of the MediCaring Project is to conduct basic research to reshape Medicare payment policy for end-of-life care. To learn more, read our White Paper on Living Well at the End of Life. You also may download a detailed report on Medicare spending in the last year of life.