OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of age on hospital resource use for seriously ill adults, and to explore whether age-related differences in resource use are explained by patients' severity of illness and preferences for ...

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: Medical treatment decisions should be based on the preferences of informed patients or their proxies and on the expected outcomes of treatment. Because seriously ill patients are at risk for cardiac arrest, examination ...

BACKGROUND: During serious illness, patient preferences regarding life-sustaining treatments play an important role in medical decisions. However, little is known about life-sustaining preference stability in this population ...

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, ...