The Chicago-based Elea Institute is seeking to improve public awareness of hospice and palliative care as well as convene discussions about ways to rethink the Medicare benefit.

Elea is a nonprofit foundation established with funds from Addus HomeCare Corp’s (NASDAQ: ADUS) $85 million acquisition of the Illinois-based nonprofit JourneyCare last month. A portion of the proceeds of the sale went to establish the institute, funds that are expected to fund its programs into the long term.

The organization is focused on three key domains, according to Kent Mathy, chair of Elea Institute’s board of directors.

“We boiled it down to three major areas. One is access to hospice and palliative care and serious illness care, then education and awareness. There’s just a lack of understanding and appreciation of all that hospice and palliative care can offer people, and so we wanted to broaden that,” Mathy told Hospice News. “And then the other area is research, and in really convening the folks that need to be brought together to look at all of the things that have to happen to advance these areas. The benefit needs to be reimagined and rethought.”

The institute seeks to be a resource for providers, caregivers and patients for research material, education, grant opportunities and case studies.

Elea is currently performing research in partnership with organizations like the National Partnership for Healthcare and Hospice Innovation (NPHI) and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care to examine new best practices and approaches to care, as well as potential reforms to the benefit, Mathy indicated.

For example, the Medicare Hospice Benefit was initially designed in the 1970s and 80s to serve the needs of cancer patients. Today, providers see patients with a growing range of diagnoses, with dementia-related illnesses becoming more prevalent.

“Our work can be convening different organizations or folks that haven’t necessarily worked together on this. It can be providing grants for folks to work together. But we’re not a lobbying group,” Mathy said. “We come at this with really one agenda, which is we’ve seen the power of a not-for-profit hospice and what it can do in a community, and we want to leverage a set of assets to bring those capabilities together and broaden them on a national level.”