Stepped Palliative Care for Patients With Advanced Lung Cancer (2024)

• ¹Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

• ²Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

• ³University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center, Philadelphia

• ⁴Duke Cancer Institute, Durham, North Carolina

• ⁵American Cancer Society, Atlanta, Georgia

Key Points

Question Is stepped care, with palliative care visits occurring only at key points in patients’ cancer trajectories and using a decrement in quality of life (QOL) to trigger more intensive palliative care, an effective model for delivering palliative care to patients with advanced cancer?

Findings In this randomized trial of 507 adults with advanced lung cancer, patients assigned to stepped palliative care had significantly fewer palliative care visits and reported QOL scores at week 24 that were noninferior (adjusted mean, 100.6 vs 97.8; P < .001) to the QOL scores of patients assigned to an early palliative care model with monthly visits after diagnosis.

Meaning Stepped palliative care is an effective and more scalable means to deliver palliative care to improve QOL for patients with advanced lung cancer.

Importance Despite the evidence for early palliative care improving outcomes, it has not been widely implemented in part due to palliative care workforce limitations.

Objective To evaluate a stepped-care model to deliver less resource-intensive and more patient-centered palliative care for patients with advanced cancer.

Design, Setting, and Participants Randomized, nonblinded, noninferiority trial of stepped vs early palliative care conducted between February 12, 2018, and December 15, 2022, at 3 academic medical centers in Boston, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Durham, North Carolina, among 507 patients who had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer within the past 12 weeks.

Intervention Step 1 of the intervention was an initial palliative care visit within 4 weeks of enrollment and subsequent visits only at the time of a change in cancer treatment or after a hospitalization. During step 1, patients completed a measure of quality of life (QOL; Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy–Lung [FACT-L]; range, 0-136, with higher scores indicating better QOL) every 6 weeks, and those with a 10-point or greater decrease from baseline were stepped up to meet with the palliative care clinician every 4 weeks (intervention step 2). Patients assigned to early palliative care had palliative care visits every 4 weeks after enrollment.

Main Outcomes and Measures Noninferiority (margin = −4.5) of the effect of stepped vs early palliative care on patient-reported QOL on the FACT-L at week 24.

Results The sample (n = 507) mostly included patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (78.3%; mean age, 66.5 years; 51.4% female; 84.6% White). The mean number of palliative care visits by week 24 was 2.4 for stepped palliative care and 4.7 for early palliative care (adjusted mean difference, −2.3; P < .001). FACT-L scores at week 24 for the stepped palliative care group were noninferior to scores among those receiving early palliative care (adjusted FACT-L mean score, 100.6 vs 97.8, respectively; difference, 2.9; lower 1-sided 95% confidence limit, −0.1; P < .001 for noninferiority). Although the rate of end-of-life care communication was also noninferior between groups, noninferiority was not demonstrated for days in hospice (adjusted mean, 19.5 with stepped palliative care vs 34.6 with early palliative care; P = .91).

Conclusions and Relevance A stepped-care model, with palliative care visits occurring only at key points in patients’ cancer trajectories and using a decrement in QOL to trigger more intensive palliative care exposure, resulted in fewer palliative care visits without diminishing the benefits for patients’ QOL. While stepped palliative care was associated with fewer days in hospice, it is a more scalable way to deliver early palliative care to enhance patient-reported outcomes.

Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03337399

End of Life, Hospice, Palliative Care Oncology Lung Cancer

Citation

Temel JS, Jackson VA, El-Jawahri A, et al. Stepped Palliative Care for Patients With Advanced Lung Cancer: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. Published online June 02, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.10398

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