Comparing Optimized Models of Primary And Specialist Services for Palliative Care

Palliative care (PC) seeks to reduce suffering and improve quality of life for patients with serious illnesses and their families. National guidelines recommend that clinicians either provide palliative care themselves (generalist PC) or consult experts (specialist PC) as a standard part of serious illness care. This pragmatic clinical trial will be conducted with 48 hospitals at two large U.S. health systems and enroll more than 78,000 seriously ill hospitalized patients. Eligibility is determined by a mortality prediction score where enrolled patients have at least a 70% risk of dying within 1 year. Enrollment assessment occurs as close as possible to 36 hours post admission. The 48 hospitals will be randomized to 3 arms: (1) standardized usual care, (2) trained generalist PC, or (3) specialist PC. Generalist clinicians are trained using the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) online trainings. This pragmatic, hybrid effectiveness-implementation parallel-cluster RCT will assess the comparative effectiveness of triggering generalist PC and specialist PC on several patient-centered outcome measures, and follows a pilot feasibility study. We will collect Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) surveys from a random subset of enrolled patients.

NCT Number	NCT07224594
Lead Sponsor	University of Pennsylvania Collaborators: Duke Clinical Research Institute
Conditions	Seriously Ill Hospitalized Patients
Enrollment	78,302 participants
Start Date	2026-02-16
Primary Completion	2029-11-01 (estimated)
Study Completion	2030-07-31 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2026-03-12