The California-based end-of-life care company Empowered Endings is establishing a palliative care arm.
The service’s brand name is pending approval from the state’s medical board. The company’s founder and CEO, Dr. Bob Uslander, was an emergency physician for 25 years when he realized the health care system was not providing high-quality care to seriously ill seniors. It was then that he established a house call practice for the homebound elderly.
Over time, Uslander found himself drawn to the palliative care space. He moved on to become a palliative care medical director at a hospice agency. Within a few years, he had established Empowered Endings.
“We created Empowered Endings, which is both a medical practice and we created a foundation at the same time to help provide additional resources, training, education, certifications and financial support for people who were navigating the end of life and needed more support than what the system was offering,” Uslander told Hospice News. “Over the past few years, we’ve been really focusing on building the Empowered Endings model and helping to teach people about empowering the end of life.”
Now, Uslander said, the company wants to increase their focus on patients upstream of the end of life. He sees palliative care as a “natural extension” of Empowered Endings.
Empowered Endings is a private pay organization. Fees are based on the intensity of the patient’s care needs, and the company works on a sliding scale. Its parent company is the Empowered Care Alliance. The forthcoming palliative care brand will perform detailed assessments of seriously ill patients, provide education, examine their resources, identify their goals and develop a care plan to guide their health care journey, according to Uslander.
The new palliative care component of the business will initially serve markets in the San Diego area and southern California region. Community outreach and education for both the public and other health care providers are crucial elements of the company’s marketing strategy.
“We try to think outside the box and find ways to support them in ways that the traditional health care system doesn’t, because they typically stay in these narrow lanes, often in the hospital system,” he said.
