If You Want to Go Far, Go Together: Lessons Learned from Quality Improvement Collaboratives in Palliative Care.

This article describes how multicenter quality improvement (QI) collaboratives in palliative care are using standardized data collection to drive better care.

Key points:

• Palliative care teams can feasibly collect standardized, patient-level outcome data during routine clinical care.
• Comparative benchmarking across programs reveals substantial variation in structures, processes, and core outcomes (e.g., symptom control), much of which is not explained by resource differences.
• These data help identify care gaps, highlight best practices, and demonstrate that meaningful outcome improvements—including better pain control—are achievable at scale.
• Patterns of palliative care use are changing: teams are increasingly caring for patients with non-cancer diagnoses and seeing more patients in outpatient settings.
• QI data are valuable not just for clinical improvement but also for justifying resource allocation and supporting research efforts.
• The authors argue that palliative care services have an ethical obligation to function as “learning organizations,” continuously measuring, comparing, and improving care in ways that reflect what matters most to patients and families, and call for further collaborative QI initiatives to sustain and advance quality.