Hospices have untapped potential to grow their patient reach, according to Compassus Senior Vice President and Chief Growth Officer Chris Core.
Demand for end-of-life care is swelling, but these services remain vastly underutilized nationwide, Core said. Technology is playing an increasingly important role in hospices’ ability to expand access and awareness, he said in a recent interview with Hospice News.
Core previously held similar roles at Lumexa Imaging, a network of diagnostic and radiology service providers. Prior to that, he was the vice president of marketing at Bio Products Laboratory Limited. He has roughly 25 years of experience in healthcare business. Core has served in marketing and sales roles at Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY), GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) and the healthcare company Grifols (Nasdaq: GRFS).
Hospice News recently sat down with Core following his appointment at Compassus in March. The company’s home-based services include hospice, palliative care, advanced care management, home health and home infusion.
Tennessee-based Compassus provides care across 33 states and is a portfolio company of the private equity firm Towerbrook Capital Partners and the health system Ascension Health. The home-based care provider has expanded in recent years in part through joint ventures. Compassus formed a JV with the health system Providence in 2024, also finalizing its partnership OhioHealth at Home that same year. The Providence at Home with Compassus joint venture recently received a regulatory green light to expand in Oregon.
Photo courtesy of CompassusHow has your experience in healthcare business help to inform your approach leading Compassus’ strategic growth?
I’ve always had a deep passion for science. I wanted to be on the research side of things and tackle scientific progress from that side of the equation. I felt the pull of the business side of healthcare, and I’ve really enjoyed working on commercial strategy across a lot of different healthcare segments. The goals are always the same: It’s maximizing patient access to care and improving the provider experience.
It’s looking at the three-pronged ladder of the triple aim of what we’re trying to do.
Number one is creating a great patient experience [and] making sure patients are educated and aware of their options.
Then, it’s the provider and making sure that experience is as seamless and frictionless as possible. Providers are under more pressure today than ever before to see more patients and do more with less. It’s critical for us to educate the providers on the benefits of hospice and home health versus the alternatives.
And then, the payer piece is ubiquitous. It’s incumbent upon us not to assume that quality is going to be understood, but to go and measure the outcomes, show the value and have that conversation with payers — both private and government — to make sure we’re continuing to get reimbursed at a levels that allows us to reinvest in a sustainable manner.
What is Compassus’ approach to strategic growth?
It really comes down to two pieces of organic growth and inorganic growth.
You’ve seen us be very acquisitive over the last few years, and we’ve expanded rapidly. I think you’ll see that continue over the next few years. That’s a combination of de novos and new program locations, and in M&A as we’re looking at strategic acquisitions, new geographies and certainly new joint venture partnerships as well.
We’re seeing really strong same-location growth on both the hospice and home health side. Only about 50% of Medicare decedents are actually using their hospice benefit. It’s just a huge opportunity there for better education, both at the patient and family caregiver level and on the provider level. It’s an industry that has opportunity for differentiation, but also growth through better education.
It’s a broad array of opportunities … That could be through acquisitions. This is certainly still a highly fragmented segment, especially in hospice and home health.
What are the keys to expansion in today’s hospice and palliative care landscape?
We’re very lucky to have multiple-scale, very successful joint ventures with leading health systems.
Healthcare is inherently local. And so, making sure there is really good coordination of care and integrated care in a local market is always important. We can be part of a national footprint and bring the value of that scale, but that brand is associated within the local market and has some deep identity roots.
Being in a joint venture relationship allows us to deliver outsized value and serve a local community where we embed our team directly alongside the care management team. We continue to look for the right partners to be clinically aligned. We have built a really strong integration engine. We’ve built out that capability and resource to be able to do that in a highly efficient manner, and that’s going to be critical going forward.
More and more health systems are recognizing the importance of a strong post-acute strategy and finding a partner with real proven outcomes.
What are the challenges impeding hospice growth and sustainability? How is Compassus addressing these issues?
The cost of care is always going to be important. We need to make sure that we continue to get reimbursement that creates a sustainable environment.
It’s getting the right level of clinical staffing across the board. That’s a challenge for every organization that is providing high-quality care. It’s making sure you have the right clinical partners at the right time, especially in areas like hospice.
A huge part of that is creating the technology environment that’s going to make that as effective as possible for that caregiver to be fully engaged in patient care and de-burden them from administrative tasks that are increasingly creating burnout.
We are way ahead of the curve in terms of actually putting clinical [artificial intelligence (AI)] out into the field and seeing the real benefits of it. Compassus has been at the forefront of that.
Everyone’s got an AI strategy … particularly when we talk about where AI is going to have an impact. And a lot of back-office AI stuff has been profound.
Putting AI in the field to improve the caregiver experience is where the real gains come over the long term in this space. It’s about focused investment in places that are having the most impact, and certainly clinical value is going to be at the top of that list.
How are hospices navigating expansion amid regulatory changes in the space, such as the temporary moratorium on new home health and hospice enrollment?
It’s unfortunate that something like the moratorium even has to exist in home health and hospice.
Compassus fully supports [the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS)] bigger efforts to strengthen program [integrity] nationwide and make sure that the good actors are continuing to grow in the best interest of patients. We continue to advocate for legislation that would strengthen hospice enrollment requirements and significantly increase penalties for providers that fail to comply with Medicare regulations.
From a practical perspective, we have an active pipeline of de novos, as well as M&A and future potential joint venture partnerships that continue to progress. We’re operating with the belief that we’ll continue to expand nationally as soon as we’re able to do so. We’re really being selective about where we want to take on new partners and where we want to grow.
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