Linking To And Excerpting From CORE IM’s “Hospice 101: Nuts and Bolts”

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Tom Wade MD

Today, I review, link to, and excerpt from CORE IM‘s Hospice 101: Nuts and Bolts.*

*Posted: July 24, 2024
By: Dr. Shreya P. Trivedi, Dr. Mahathi Komaragiri, Dr. Gillian Sutton, Roger Schrader, MSW, LICSW, Bryanna Tobin, LMT, Dr. Sarah Schwartz, Dr. Jafar Al-Mondhiry and Dr. Harry Han
Graphic: Dr. Jesse Powell
Audio: Daksh Bhatia
Peer Review: Dr. Charlotte Grinberg, Dr. Helen Knight, Dr. Mara Feingold-Link

All that follows is from the above resource.

Play podcast in new window

Time Stamps

  • 03:05 What is hospice care and its philosophy?
  • 06:15 Who qualifies for hospice?
  • 08:19 Who makes up the hospice interdisciplinary team?
  • 17:25 Who pays for hospice?
  • 21:34 What are the different levels of hospice care?
  • 31:59 What are some limitation of the hospice Medicare benefit?

Sponsor:*

*I have no relationship with CORE IM nor with this sponsor. I just included this as a way of thanking the good people at CORE IM.

Freed is an AI scribe that listens, prepares your notes, and writes your note in < 30 seconds. Freed learns your style over time and is HIPAA compliant!

Join over 9K clinicians who love Freed and saves them hours a day! Use the code CORE50 to get 50% off your first month with Freed.

Behind the Scenes Interviews

Music Therapy in Hospice Intro

How Hospice Music Therapy Touched A Family

Challenges in Hospice Music Therapy Field

Show Notes

Pearl 1: Philosophy of hospice

  • Hospice is the shift in focus of care from curing the illness to focusing on comfort, pain relief and symptom management.
    • Don’t forget that comfort includes more than physical comfort.

Pearl 2: Who qualifies for hospice?

  •  To qualify for hospice a patient must have a terminal illness.
  • For patients who live longer than that 6 months, a physician or NP will need to re-certify every 2 months
  • The Local Coverage Determination: policy used to determine hospice coverage

Pearl 3: Who makes up the hospice team?

Pearl 4: Who pays for hospice?

  • Most insurance follows the Medicare system in which a patient who is enrolled in hospice will then have a Hospice Benefit that directly covers medical, nursing, counseling, and bereavement services.
    •  Unfortunately, this means that many of our uninsured patients face challenges when enrolling in hospice.
  •  The hospice agency is then paid a fixed daily rate for every patient in hospice based on the level of care. This fixed rate includes medications, DME and personnel.

Pearl 5: What are the different levels of care and what are the limitations of the hospice benefit?

  • There are 4 levels of hospice care
    • Routine level of care
      • Takes place at home (nursing home, assisted living, independent living home, etc) where the hospice team comes to see the patient as needed.
    • General Inpatient Care (GIP)
      • Takes place in the hospital or at a GIP hospice facility for patients who need management of uncontrolled symptoms that cannot be provided at home.
    • Respite care
      • For patients already enrolled on hospice services with an agency
      • Short term care to relieve the beneficiary’s caregiver for up to 5 consecutive days.
      • The patient will go to an inpatient hospice facility, SNF or hospital.
    • Continuous home care
      •  For brief periods of crisis when a patient needs continuous care in the home setting.
  • Patients qualify for different levels of care based on their symptoms, which is challenging as it still requires significant assistance from the patient’s caregivers.

References

 

This entry was posted in Hospice Care. Bookmark the permalink.