How Should Cost-Informed Goals of Care Decisions Be Facilitated at Life's End?

Abstract

Interventions near patients' deaths in the United States are often expensive, burdensome, and inconsistent with patients' goals and preferences. For patients and their loved ones to make informed care decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs. This commentary on a case discusses strategies for sharing such information and suggests that properly designed advance care planning incentives can help improve communication and decision sharing.