RAND Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation
Eligibility for Comprehensive End of Life Services: Developing and Piloting a Method
Objectives:
To develop a method that uses MCBS surveys and Medicare claims to estimate onset of serious chronic illness that will continue through the end of life and to test the insights possible by applying the method to two paradigm clinical conditions, lung cancer and emphysema.
Progress to Date
We have identified an analyst to work on the project. We had expected that there would be enough Medicare claims to do this work, but that turns out not to be the case. The publicly available ones do not have accurate date of death any more, so costs near death would be inaccurate. The number of deaths in the MCBS is small and the interviews generally long before death. The investigator is working on the possibility of getting to use a study dataset that includes MDS or OASIS or both.
Next Steps
We intend to get underway on programming. If we use the MDS-OASIS enhanced dataset, we will switch to working on frailty and dementia, rather than lung cancer and emphysema.
Top