The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with Homecare Homebase. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of home health, hospice care, senior housing, skilled nursing, and behavioral health. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/. Brittany Chambers, Director, Health Equity and […]
Center to Advance Palliative Care
Patients who receive palliative care in a hospital often have trouble finding a provider to continue those services after they return home. The number of hospitals that offer palliative care has grown exponentially during the past two decades. As of 2020, more than 83% of U.S. hospitals with 50 or more beds had a palliative […]
Past payment model demonstrations that included community-based palliative care offer a window into how these services could generate cost savings and improved quality. Among those demos is the Medicare Care Choices Model (MCCM), which ran between 2016 and 2021. The model illustrated palliative care’s potential for driving down health care costs for seriously ill patients, […]
Palliative care providers find themselves in a dilemma. Demand for the service they provide is growing, but that growth is hindered by a lack of industry-wide standards for palliative care. Experts in the field point to a dearth of standards that define exactly what effective palliative care is in the current environment, plus a contract-by-contract […]
Data are reshaping the health care space, and hospice is no exception. Data has played a large role in the ability to gauge the impact of end-of life care. Hospice providers have needed a window into access and utilization, as well as how lawmakers are shaping policies around health care. This article is the second […]
Evolving demographic and economic forces have placed palliative care among the nation’s fastest growing health care sectors. Interest in the palliative care market has spiked in recent years, partly due to the value proposition these services offer to patients, families, providers and payers alike, according to Fred Bentley, managing director at health care consulting firm […]
Strains on reimbursement, referrals and staffing represent the biggest obstacles to palliative care providers’ viability and growth. It takes time to build up the payment, referral and workforce resources needed to support a sustainable palliative care program, according to Dr. Stephen Goldfine, chief medical officer at Samaritan Healthcare & Hospice. The New Jersey-based nonprofit offers […]
A new cancer-focused payment model demonstration from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) could create opportunities for palliative care providers. The goals of the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM), which went live on July 1, are to improve quality and reduce the cost of cancer care with augmented care coordination. While documents on the […]
This spring, Kansas launched a five-year plan to make palliative care more accessible to its nearly 3 million residents. The seeds of the plan were planted in 2018 when the legislature established the state’s Palliative Care and Quality of Life Interdisciplinary Advisory Council. The group was charged with advising the state Department of Health on […]
New legislation is leading some hospices to consider what a potential community-based palliative care payment demo would mean for them — as well as what it would look like. Four U.S. senators recently introduced a bipartisan bill that, if enacted, would steer the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to develop a palliative care-specific […]