For Payers & Plan Sponsors

Earlier palliative & ACP engagement, measured in ICU days and dollars.

Members facing serious illness are the most expensive cohort you cover — and the most passively steered into aggressive end-of-life care by default. GentleHorizon gives plans and payers a privacy-first channel to surface advance care planning, goals-of-care conversations, and family caregiver-burden screening before the ICU stay. No PHI leaves the device. No BAA required. Source-cited outcomes for partnership conversations.

📄 Download the payer ROI one-pager (PDF)

🔒 Zero PHI leaves the device ✅ No BAA required 📑 Source-cited figures 🖨 Printable handout

Payer-relevant outcomes

The peer-reviewed evidence base for early palliative and advance care planning engagement — what the literature actually shows.

25–30%

Reduction in ICU days in the last 6 months of life

Palliative care consultation in the ICU is consistently associated with shorter ICU length-of-stay and fewer terminal ICU admissions — the largest single driver of end-of-life spend on a member-year basis.

Source: Khandelwal N, et al. Health Affairs. 2016. Variation in ICU use at end of life among Medicare decedents →

~$2,500

Net per-admission cost reduction when palliative care is consulted

Across eight U.S. hospitals with mature palliative care programs, mean net savings of roughly $2,500–3,000 per admission for patients who died in the hospital — driven by shorter stays, fewer aggressive interventions, and earlier hospice transitions.

Source: Morrison RS, et al. J Palliat Med. 2011. Cost savings associated with U.S. hospital palliative care programs →

~50%

Less aggressive end-of-life care for early-palliative patients

In the landmark randomized trial of early outpatient palliative care for metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer, patients receiving early palliative care had significantly lower rates of aggressive end-of-life treatment and chemotherapy in the final 14 days — without shortened survival.

Source: Temel JS, et al. N Engl J Med. 2010. Early palliative care for metastatic NSCLC →

ZBI-12

Validated family caregiver-burden screening

Family caregiver burden is a leading driver of avoidable inpatient utilization — caregiver burnout frequently precipitates ER visits and unplanned admissions. Routine ZBI-12 screening surfaces high-burden families before they reach crisis, and aligns with CMS quality-measure direction of travel.

Source: Institute of Medicine. Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life. 2014. Read the framework report →

Why this matters now

CMS hospice and palliative-care quality measures are tightening. CMS Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience (GUIDE) and other value-based models are paying for what advance care planning has always promised — fewer unwanted ICU stays, fewer readmissions, earlier hospice enrollment. Plans that surface advance care planning and caregiver-burden screening at the member level, outside the clinical visit, are the ones best positioned to capture those dollars.

GentleHorizon removes the largest friction in the buyer conversation: privacy. Every tool runs in the member's browser via localStorage — no PHI is transmitted, no BAA is required, and adoption friction drops from "enterprise pilot" to "send the URL." Pair that with the figures above and you have a partnership-ready case for value-based care alignment.

Supporting Read

For the value-based-care lead who wants the long-form version — caregiver burden as a hidden cost driver on health-plan books, the GUIDE model economics, and where caregiver-burden screening fits in the VBC window:

Read the long-form companion: Family Caregiver Burden — The Hidden Cost to Health Plans →

Resource

Source-cited ROI summary — printable, one page

A printable one-page payer-facing summary of the cited ICU-day reduction, cost-avoidance, and caregiver-burden figures above — for the value-based care lead on your team.

Download the payer ROI one-pager (PDF) → Preview as HTML →

or → Talk to the payer partnership team

Talk to our payer partnership team

GentleHorizon is building privacy-first patient-facing tools for serious-illness planning. We'd like 30 minutes with the lead on your value-based care, palliative, or hospice strategy.

gentlehorizon@polsia.app

↓ Download the ROI one-pager to bring to the call

For Providers → For Hospice Programs → Partnership one-pager (PDF) →