A CEO's Thoughts on Marketplace

Last week, on February 21, the most recent piece on hospice care by NPR Nashville reporter Blake Farmer went out via Marketplace. In his story, “Some wonder whether hospice puts too much of the burden for care on families,” he once again questions whether family caregivers are overwhelmed by hospice in the home and are hospice providers doing enough with a $200 a day reimbursement.

After his last story ran in January, I spent time on the phone with Mr. Farmer explaining how hospice works and what the many benefits and challenges are in providing care. I stressed the importance of balanced reporting and was direct about what we do so well as a provider community and what we as a field must focus on and continue working towards.

Given the current structure of the Medicare hospice benefit, it is not possible to provide the support that those unfamiliar with hospice care might expect. We must learn to address unreasonable expectations just as we continue to challenge ourselves to innovate and reach beyond current limitations. We must not allow poor care to ever take a rampant hold within our field or become the accepted norm for the care we provide.

The focus on quality must be expanded; in fact, that’s what we are doing by offering educational programs like the Hospice Compliance Certificate Program and the inaugural Hospice Quality Certificate Program that will debut at next month’s Leadership and Advocacy Conference. The upgrade to our E-Online education portal, the focused topics of the 2020 webinar series and the decision to cut the webinar registration fees in half to make these offerings available to as many of our members as possible, the ongoing free webinars focused on business development have been created to help providers thrive in this challenging environment. Working to help provide the resources and education needed to continue to raise the bar on quality is what is driving the creation of our new Quality Connections program that will be unfolding over the next two years. We will shine a light on exemplary programs, help good programs become great, and provide the support new or struggling hospices might need.

Hospice works. We know that. All of us are familiar with the talking points that reinforce the value of hospice and the value that hospice brings to the health care system:

• 97.3% of respondents indicated that they would recommend their hospice to others.
• A study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, clearly demonstrates higher quality services and better outcomes for the patient and family.
• Research published in peer-reviewed journals amply demonstrate that hospice care saves the health care system money; about $2,800 per Medicare beneficiary reports a Duke study.

(For those interested in a deeper dive into some of these points, I encourage you to download the policy brief, “Hospice: Leading Interdisciplinary Care,” that was commissioned from Dobson & DaVanzo as part of the My Hospice Campaign.)

I take the work that we are all doing very seriously and am passionately committed to improving quality, access, and the role of person- and family-centered care in our health care delivery system. NHPCO benefits from the support of so many across the broad hospice and palliative care provider community in the U.S. 

We know that not all hospices are the same; in fact, our diversity is a strength. However, we cannot allow our divisions—in tax-status, location, or any other difference—distract us from focusing on quality patient and family care. It will take all of us working together to focus on improving our care system.

Edo Banach
President and CEO
February 24, 2020