BACKGROUND: Serious illness often causes economic hardship for patients' families. However, it is not known whether this hardship is associated with a preference for the goal of care to focus on maximizing comfort instead ...

BACKGROUND: Physicians are frequently unaware of patient preferences for end-of-life care. Identifying and exploring barriers to patient-physician communication about end-of-life issues may help guide physicians and ...

PURPOSE: For patients hospitalized with serious illnesses, we identified factors associated with a stated preference to forgo cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), examined physician-patient communication about these issues, ...

OBJECTIVE: Would increasing the documentation of advance directives (ADs) lead to a reduction in resource utilization? We examined this question by conducting three secondary analyses: (1) we tested for a change in ...