The Pennant Group (Nasdaq: PNTG) has been quietly building palliative care programs driven by its local leaders with support from the corporate office’s Service Center.
Pennant is the holding company for a group of independent hospice, home health and senior living providers located across 13 states. The company currently holds 115 hospice and home health agencies and 54 senior living providers as independent subsidiaries.
Due to this decentralized model, local agencies held by Pennant have a great deal of flexibility when it comes to how they deliver palliative care, according to Jason Steik, chief clinical officer at Pennant.
“We take a local-model approach where teams can build out what their palliative programs look like, and then we surround them with Service Center support,” Steik told Palliative Care News. “We provide guidelines and guidance on how things typically are run with program management and stuff, and often it aligns with regulatory requirements and payment models.”
Pennant’s Service Center also facilitates education in palliative care for local leaders and provides, including courses from the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC).
However, Pennant’s palliative care programs have a second pillar that is proliferating under the leadership of CMO Derrel Walker. In this model, administered through Pennant’s Provider Services Program, the company seeks to break down health care silos and provide coordinated care, according to Walker.
The Provider Services Program reflects The Pennant Group’s broader philosophy of care, Walker said.
“Our philosophy is that palliative care as a whole should be kind of a blanket that goes over all of those things and helps coordinate the care that those patients need across all of those settings, no matter which specialists they’re seeing or which which Medicare defined service line they’re a part of,” Walker told Palliative Care News. “We’re taking the approach that basically all of the patients that we interact with at The Pennant Group are in the space of probably needing some form of palliative care.”
To bring this philosophy into practice, Pennant offers training and guidance on palliative care for members of its physician group who oversee a patients’ care. These practitioners are reimbursed via Medicare Part B and have the ability to integrate palliative services into a patient’s care when medically warranted.
This approach helps reduce fragmented care for seniors, Walker indicated.
“We adopt the philosophy of combining palliative care and geriatrics and primary care together so that we can deliver what the patient needs and try to break down the silos that exist,” Walker said. “Our palliative care programs, they take multiple forms, partially because of our unique operating model that is locally controlled, but also because the the agencies that run these palliative care programs are adapting to what the community and the patients need.”
To further expand these practices, Pennant is further building out its Provider Services Program.
In this model, a clinician, often a nurse practitioner, is responsible for overseeing all the care a patient receives. These practitioners are backed up by a care coordination staff. Walker said that these teams are always looking at patients through a “palliative care lens.”
“The Provider Services Program is a model that we’ve really invested a lot of time and effort into, that, in many ways, is filling that palliative continuum gap. So we’ve put a provider at the center that quarterbacks the care that’s taking place,” Steik said. “Regardless of where the patient is in the continuum, the provider follows that patient. They interact with the various caregivers and clinicians in those settings to get information and be able to respond to those needs. That’s the piece that is something really innovative and special that we’ve done to address this palliative gap.”
