| Summary: | In this and other reports, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has documented both regional and hospital-specific variations in the medical care provided to Medicare beneficiaries with one or more chronic illnesses at the end of life. The 2008 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, for example, reported that, in their last six months of life, chronically ill Medicare beneficiaries in some regions of the country spent more than three times as many days in the hospital and more than ten times as many days in an intensive care unit (ICU) as patients in other regions. This report updates to 2007 previous findings regarding regional variations in end-of-life care. It also documents trends from 2003 to 2007 in the use of medical resources to treat Medicare beneficiaries at the end of life, both among hospital referral regions and among 94 academic medical centers
|
|---|