Clark County, Nevada is a crowded market for hospice providers, with 290 licensed hospice firms for 2.3 million residents. Add palliative care, and providers in the area have their work cut out when it comes to reaching referral partners and the public about the service.

Keith Everett, CEO of ProCare Hospice, embraces the challenges, seeking to put ProCare on the map for palliative care. The company launched their community-based service in March 2025 and already has 70 patients receiving palliative care services.

“The biggest challenge isn’t demand; it’s clarity,” Everett said. “Marketing palliative care is uniquely challenging because it sits in a misunderstood space — caught between curative treatment and hospice. Most people, including health care professionals, equate ‘palliative’ with ‘giving up,’ when it’s about adding quality to life.”

Everett said ProCare places education about the difference in hospice and palliative care at the forefront of their marketing efforts, starting with their referral partners.

“As they understand it, they give us a referral for those patients, then we are educating [the patient face-to-face] when we have the opportunity,” he said.

For marketing to other providers, Everett said the key is highlighting the benefits of palliative care for managing an advanced illness, such as keeping patients out of the hospital and emergency room. For patients, Everett and his team highlight the benefits of symptom management while still seeking curative treatments.

“We’re just that added level of service and support,” he told Palliative Care News. “We meet their service needs while also supporting the other clinicians.” 

Everett said another barrier is the lack of a clear service identity for palliative care, which can lead to confusion for patients and referral partners.

“Palliative care often varies drastically from one provider to another in terms of who delivers the care, when it’s initiated, and how it’s billed,” he said. “Combine that with limited public awareness, inconsistent payer coverage and regulatory ambiguity — and you’ve got an uphill climb. People want relief from pain, anxiety and disease burden. They just don’t know that what they want is called palliative care.”

Everett stepped into the CEO role at ProCare in November 2024, taking over for Dr. Clevis Parker (who is now focusing on his role as CMO). Parker and Everett worked together to create a vertically integrated palliative care model. This helps the team provide a higher level of service before patients potentially transition to hospice, according to Everett. 

Marketing this model focuses on the difference between palliative care and hospice, he said. Whether to the community or referral partners, ProCare highlights the services and how patient needs are met at each step of their health care journey.

Palliative doesn’t have a uniform national metric system of quality care like hospice, so it’s on the provider to create those data sets, according to Everett.

“It creates a gap in understanding the true experience of what a patient and caregiver is going through,” he said. “We have a true opportunity to ask the patients what their experience is like. On the hospice side, it’s a caregiver’s experience, which is done after the patient has passed away. We don’t get to directly hear from the patient. In palliative care we do have that opportunity, and I would even say we have a responsibility to hear from them about what’s happening.”

Everett, through his consulting firm TruHue, has created a standardized set of questions for care satisfaction, which ProCare is implementing. The organization is tracking both operational and clinical measures to improve the care palliative patients receive. Everett’s hope is that the data the company gathers can be used with referral partners and policymakers to improve palliative care, not just at ProCare, but across the county.

Like any business, ProCare tracks their return on investment (ROI) such as monthly referral volume, source distribution, and geographical penetration, Everett said. But the real rewards are seeing how patients’ lives improve after initiating care. To that end, ProCare tracks the percentage of patients with documented improvements in pain, dyspnea, nausea, and anxiety, Everett said. ProCare targets improvement measures within 72 hours of a patient starting care. Referral partners, especially hospitals, want to see a reduction in 30-day hospital readmissions, as well.

“Those, in my opinion, are the real ROIs because we’re making a difference in those patients’ lives,” he said.

Whether Everett and his team are using brochures or PowerPoint presentations to reach clients, he said everything in marketing palliative care comes back to education.

“It’s not new, but it’s relatively unknown,” he said. “I think what have done, what’s been really successful, is starting with a base of education. Let me educate you first on palliative care and the difference between palliative care and hospice. We’re being 100% transparent and being authentic with our messaging.”

For providers looking to update their marketing for palliative care, Everett had a few general tips for getting started. “First, define your model,” he said. “Is it physician-led? Nurse practitioner-driven? Facility-based or home or community-based? Fee-for-service or value-based? Here is the test: If your own staff can’t articulate it in one sentence, your marketing won’t work.

“Next, identify your primary audiences and pain points. What’s the cost of not engaging your service—emotionally for the family and financially for the system? Also, ensure your branding is distinct from hospice. Many people decline palliative care because they fear it’s a gateway to death. Your plan must include brand positioning, content strategy, educational outreach and measurable key performance indicators that align with both mission and margin.”