Resumen
Timely palliative care is palliative care personalized based on patients? needs and delivered at the optimal time and setting. It involves a systematic process to identify patients with high supportive care needs and referring these individuals to specialist palliative care in a timely manner based on standardized referral criteria. Timely palliative care brings together several important advances, including systematic symptom screening, electronic health records, and outpatient/telehealth palliative care to deliver personalized, patient-centered care towards improving patient outcomes. Empiric studies found that patients could be referred more frequently and in a timely fashion when standardized referral criteria are used. Implementation of timely palliative care at each institution requires visionary leadership, commitment of oncology teams, a robust palliative care clinic, a customized set of referral criteria and preferably an integrated electronic health record system.