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Residents and Families Benefit From Our Expertise in End-Of-Life Care
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Our nurses are skilled in pain management, an area important to the
resident and carefully scrutinized during annual surveys. - All of our branches employ Certified Hospice Palliative Nurses (CHPN).
- They also provide a social worker for psychosocial intervention.
- Spiritual Counselors are available and skilled in spiritual care and bereavement.
- We are also skilled and experienced in helping the family deal with end-of-life issues.
- We provide the necessary supporting documentation State and Medicare surveys and audits:
- Validation of resident decline by an outside provider.
- Terminal prognosis of 6 months or less by two physicians.
- Hospice consent form: resident elects hospice care.
- Upon hospice election, facility checks box PI of the MDS which alerts Medicare that the resident is expected to decline.
- Charting resident status by both our branch and your facility.
- Declining residents are "risk-adjusted" in Quality Measures.
- Advance directives.
- We provide a level of care that takes a burden off you and your staff.
- Our case managers are always on call, which cuts down on calls to the DON.
- Our branches provide patient medications related to the hospice diagnosis.
- They also provide DME, which avoids buying it or borrowing from another resident.
- We share our expertise in symptom management with your staff, which lessens their workload and helps retention.
- We assist families with estate/financial planning, advance directives, funeral plans and spiritual counseling which "unburden" facility staff from providing this help.
- Our Home Health Aides provide more "hands on" care for the patient.
- Hospice care improves census by keeping beds full.
- We provide a prompt payment for hospice patient's room and board.
There is no question that hospice services save money for the Medicare system. When comfort care at home is utilized, many expensive hospitalization visits are avoided.
- 28% of all Medicare reimbursements go towards the care of people in their last year of life; almost 50% of those costs are incurred in the last two months of life.
- For every dollar Medicare spent on hospice, it saved $1.52 in Medicare Part A and Part B expenditures.
- In the last year of life, hospice patients incurred $2,727 less in costs than those not enrolled under Medicare Hospice Benefit.
- These savings totaled $3,192 in the last month of life., as hospice home care days often substituted for expensive hospitalizations.