Understanding the challenges for oncologists in predicting the end-of-life phase of care in cancer patients with advanced solid tumor diagnoses

281 Background: Early advanced care planning and palliative care improves outcomes during the end-of-life phase of care (EOL) for metastatic cancer patients. Identifying patients who are likely to transition to EOL is a necessary step to prioritize limited palliative care resources and is integral to success in value-based payment models. We analyzed whether physician documentation of prognosis in a clinical pathways system (CPS) could reliably predict when patients are nearing EOL for a large community oncology practice of more than 70 medical oncologists. Methods: Tennessee Oncology (TO) requires physicians to use CPS for all Medicare patients. CPS prompts physicians to answer the “prognostic question” “would you be surprised if this patient died in the next year?” for all OCM patients with advanced solid tumors at the beginning of treatment or at the time of a change in treatment plan. Prognostic question responses were compared to actual dates of death documented in the practice management system. Results: A total of 5,266 distinct patients were expected to trigger an OCM episode during 2017. The CPS prompted a response to the prognostic question for 1,228 (23%) of these OCM patients. There were 665 (54%) positive prognoses (expect patient to live more than 1 year) and 563 (46%) negative prognoses (expect patient to die within 1 year). Physicians documented accurate prognoses in 712 (58%) of cases. For patients with positive prognosis 557 (84%) were accurate. For patients with negative prognosis 155 (21.8%) were accurate. Conclusions: We found that for patients with terminal cancer, it is difficult for physicians to accurately predict prognosis. These findings support the importance of ASCO guidelines pertaining to patient access to palliative care during the entirety of cancer treatment for all patients with metastatic cancer. [Table: see text]