Racial and Ethnic Disparities Found in Palliative Care Use Among Hospitalized Patients With End-Stage Kidney Disease
Less than 3 percent of hospitalized patients with ESKD receive palliative care services, and black and Hispanic patients have the lowest proportion
Striking racial and ethnic disparities exist in the use of palliative care by hospitalized patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) on dialysis, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai report. The findings were published today in Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Palliative care is team-based care focused on improving quality of life and reducing suffering for people with serious illness and their families. Palliative care—which better aligns medical treatments with patients’ goals and wishes, aggressively treats distressing symptoms, and improves care coordination—is associated with shorter hospital stays and lower costs, according to research published in 2018 by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
To investigate palliative care use, the researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study using the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) from 2006 to 2014, which affords a large pool of minority (black, Hispanic, and Asian) and white patients. The NIS database is the largest, publicly available, all-payer inpatient database in the United States. While the researchers found a clear increase in palliative care utilization for all inpatients with ESKD, they also identified significant variations among minorities compared to white patients which persisted across all hospital subtypes, even hospitals that serve a large proportion of minority patients.
Among the 5,230,865 patients hospitalized during the study period, the palliative care referral rate increased from 0.24 percent in 2006 to 2.7 percent in 2014 among hospitalized patients with ESKD on dialysis. This increasing trend was evident across all racial and ethnic groups; however, white patients had the fastest increase in palliative care utilization, further widening the difference in utilization from that of minorities and resulting in a pronounced divide in 2014: 1.1 percent in black and Hispanic patients versus 2.1 percent in white patients.
The researchers note that the reasons for the disparities are complex and multifactorial. “One of the unique findings of the study includes the finding that even when minority patients were admitted to hospitals that treat a higher volume of minority patients, they were still less likely to receive palliative care than white patients. Further investigation into the causes of racial disparities is necessary to better understand the systemic issues contributing to barriers to palliative care services in the vulnerable end-stage kidney disease population," says principal investigator Lili Chan, MD, a nephrologist and clinical instructor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“These are striking findings in light of the high mortality rate and high burden of severe symptoms that patients with ESKD experience such as anorexia, pruritus, dyspnea, and depression. Evidence suggests that symptom-focused palliative care can effectively alleviate these debilitating symptoms,” says principal investigator Girish Nadkarni, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Nephrology), Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Clinical Director of the Charles Bronfman Institute of Personalized Medicine, also at Mount Sinai.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.
As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.
Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York by Newsweek and No. 5 on the magazine’s World’s Best Hospitals list. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 11 among U.S. medical schools and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools for National Institutes of Health funding, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.