Demand for mental health care skyrocketed during the pandemic. This growing need has spurred the National Partnership for Healthcare and Hospice Innovation (NPHI) to recently develop its Community Counseling Guide to help member providers structure bereavement services, including best practices for billing.
Adults nationwide have experienced increased levels of stress, anxiety and depression since COVID-19’s onset. About 41% of adults reported symptoms associated with anxiety and depressive disorder in 2021, compared to 11% during 2019, reported the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Additionally, the percentage of adults who reported an unmet mental health care need rose to 11.7% last year, up from 9.2% in 2020, according to data from the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The NPHI guide is designed to help hospices develop and sustain “non-hospice community counseling services.” This includes needs assessment and screening tools, as well as a platform for providers to share best practices.
“Before COVID-19 we were seeing a concerning rise in behavioral and mental health acuity, which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Natasha Walsh, executive director of Rockbridge Area Hospice, an NPHI member. “Moreover, access to the support needed to respond to this crisis is in short supply, highlighting the opportunity for our member organizations to share their expertise in dealing with grief and loss.”
Hospice providers must offer bereavement counseling for a minimum of 13 months following a patient’s death, per U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements. Providers often extend grief care available throughout their entire communities, regardless of whether the deceased was a patient.
The pandemic has taken a heavy toll on hospice’s ability to reach grieving families as more than 1 million people in the United States have lost loved ones to COVID-19. In the midst of this, hospice providers are applying additional resources and new methods to meet community needs.
NPHI is a collaborative network of more than 80 nonprofit hospice and palliative care providers across 34 states and the District of Columbia. Providers in the network collaborate to identify and develop new strategies and business models while improving quality and access to care for patients and families.
The new guide emerged from the organization’s Innovation Lab. The document includes tools for screening, assessment and ongoing care of community counseling clients, as well as recommended instruments to measure the impact of these services.
NPHI developed the resource in part to help hospices sustain these programs in a changing environment. Uncertainties abound in the hospice space regarding the future of telehealth, alternative payment models and ongoing workforce shortages.
While in-person programs are returning, many hospices continue to augment their bereavement services with telehealth. But the long-term outlook is muddy.
While CMS implemented a number of temporary flexibilities to expand telehealth during the COVID-19 public health emergency, the number of those that the agency will make permanent (if any) is unknown.
Providers are also anticipating a shift towards value-based payment for at least some of their services.
Understanding of the costs of care for counseling and bereavement s service will be critical under value-based payment models, NPHI indicated. The counseling guide includes resources to help guide revenue cycle management processes, with a focus on payer contracting, insurance verification and financial assistance.
Many in the hospice industry see service diversification, including counseling services, as a business imperative to ensure that hospices, particularly smaller community-based organizations, remain financially viable in order to support their mission.
“As health care reimbursement evolves from the fee-for-service standard to value-based care, I am confident that this set of resources, created by those on the front lines, will help NPHI member programs deliver urgently needed and high-quality community counseling services across the country,” said J. Cameron Muir, M.D., chief innovation officer at NPHI.
Companies featured in this article:
National Partnership for Hospice Innovation, Rockbridge Area Hospice
