Earlier Palliative Care Involvement is fundamental, human-centered care

Imagine you are planning the most important journey of your life — one with an uncertain road ahead. 

Would you rather set out with no map, no compass, and no sense of how much time or energy the path will demand? Or would you choose to travel with a trusted guide at your side: someone who knows the terrain, who can help you manage the difficult stretches, and who helps  provide you with clear information so that you can decide which detours are worth taking and which hills may simply not be worth climbing? 

For the millions of Americans living with a serious illness, that guide exists. It is called Palliative Care — and far too many patients receive their expertise too late, if at all. 

Palliative Care is specialized medical care provided by a specially trained team — doctors, nurses, social workers, and chaplains — working alongside a patient's existing physicians to provide a critical layer of support. It is focused on establishing goals of care and relieving the symptoms, pain, and stress of serious illness. It can be provided at any age, at any stage of illness, and concurrent with curative treatment. Palliative care and active treatment are not opposites. They are partners. 

Perhaps the deepest truth about palliative care is this: it restores the one thing that serious illness so often steals from patients and families — their agency. 

When a patient and family understand what to expect as serious illness progresses, they can make choices that are genuinely theirs. They can decide how to spend their time. They can say the things that need to be said. They can gather people around them. They can stop spending precious energy on treatments that no longer serve their goals — and start investing it in what matters most to them. 

Honest communication, delivered with skill and compassion, is one of the highest expressions of respect we can offer another human being. It is, in the truest sense of the word, an act of deep caring. 

To be human is to need to be seen — not just as a diagnosis, not as a set of lab values or a scan result, but as a person with a history, with love, with unfinished business, and with deeply held values about what makes life worth living. 

Palliative care is built around this conviction. 

 CAPC defines the palliative care team as an interdisciplinary discipline — medicine, nursing, social work, and chaplaincy — precisely because human suffering is never purely physical. The fear of being a burden to a family. The spiritual reckoning that often accompanies a serious diagnosis. The grief of not knowing how much time remains. 

These dimensions of the patient experience are not footnotes to clinical care. They are its very center. 

When a patient's values and goals are genuinely heard and woven into their care plan, something remarkable happens: they feel less like a passive recipient of medicine being done to them, and more like a person whose life still belongs to them. 

That is dignity. And it is never too early to offer it. 

An increasing number of patients and families are aware of, appreciate it, and expect Palliative Care to be available to them. Regretfully, the adoption of Palliative Care among health systems has not kept up with this trend – one of the main reasons being misunderstood economics. It is time to make Palliative Care a mainstream omni-available specialty service no different from the Emergency Medicine, Cardiovascular, Pulmonary/Critical Care, and alike. 

There are very few interventions in all of healthcare that generate benefit across every stakeholder simultaneously. Palliative care is one of them — and the case for expanding it can be made on any single dimension alone. Together, the argument becomes undeniable. 

Patients and families win. Deliberate, caring, fact-focused conversation about the severity of illness — held in a space where goals of care can be honestly explored — gives patients and families something medicine too rarely offers: clarity.  

Collaborating physicians and advanced practice providers win. When palliative care is part of the team, a patient's whole care becomes more complete — not just reviewed and discussed, but genuinely aligned among the patient, family, and clinical team. This directly alleviates the moral distress that so many clinicians carry silently: the weight of knowing a patient's goals are not reflected in their care plan and feeling without the time or tools to change it. 

Hospitals and health systems win. The financial case is well-documented by CAPC and has been validated through real-world hospital-based analysis. Proactive symptom management reduces avoidable utilization — fewer crisis-driven emergency visits, fewer unnecessary hospitalizations, more appropriate use of resources across the care continuum. Full integration of palliative care in hospitals could generate an estimated $6 billion in annual savings nationwide. These programs are not cost centers; they are value drivers.  

The broader healthcare ecosystem wins. When care is aligned, high-quality, and genuinely patient- and family-centered — when the right conversations happen at the right time, and the right supports are in place — the entire system functions better. Better outcomes. Better experience. Better stewardship of resources. Better trust between patients and the institutions meant to serve them. 

The case for advancing palliative care services can be made on any one of these facts standing alone. But together? 

This is not a nice-to-have service. This is a required staple of serious illness care — and every health system, every policymaker, and every clinical leader has both the opportunity and the obligation to treat it that way. 

Vantage Clinical Partners has had the pleasure of building robust palliative care and hospice services that incorporate every facet that state of the art palliative medicine programs should offer.  

Statistics and clinical data sourced from the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) and the CAPC 2024 Serious Illness Scorecard. 

Learn more at capc.org | getpalliativecare.org 

Beth Papetti, MBA FHM

Principal & Chief Operating Officer