Objectives: To evaluate the usefulness of a clinical scheme to classify older decedents to better understand the issues associated with healthcare use and costs in the last year of life.
Design: We analyzed Medicare claims data for a random sample of 0.1% of all Medicare beneficiaries with expenditures between 1993 and 1998. This sample yielded 7,966 deaths.
Setting: Medicare claims data.
Participants: Medicare beneficiaries.
Measurements: We classified decedents into groups representing four trajectories at the end of life: sudden death, terminal illness, organ failure, and frailty.
Results: Ninety-two percent of decedents were captured by the profiling strategy. The four trajectory groups had distinct patterns of demographics, care delivery, and Medicare expenditures. Frailty was a dominant pattern, with 47% of all decedents, whereas sudden death claimed only 7%; cancer claimed 22%, and organ system failure, 16%.
Conclusions: The clinical scheme to classify decedents appears to fit most decedents and to form groups with substantial clinical differences. Acknowledging the differences among these groups may be a fruitful way to evaluate expenditures and develop strategies to improve care at the end of life.