Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

The Vital Role of Home Health and Hospice at Home in Improving the Patient Experience

The patient’s experience is a cornerstone of quality care. While hospital stays are sometimes necessary, thankfully, the importance of home health and hospice care has become better appreciated for its role in delivering a more patient-centered approach to healthcare. This session will explore the reasons why these services play such a vital role in improving the patient experience.

9:00am – 9:45am

Hospital at Home

Partnering with a hospital system to care for high acuity patients in their home can benefit hospitals and home health & hospice companies alike. The presenter will share the experience of partnering with a regional cancer hospital to create a Hospital at Home program. Benefits of this program have included decreased costs for the hospital system and increased hospice census and patient satisfaction for the hospice agency.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Preventing Burnout Among Hospice Care Providers

Hospice and home care providers play a critical role in the healthcare industry. They offer medical support for the terminally ill and elderly, helping them live safely and comfortably with their loved ones for as long as possible. But despite their importance, these caregivers have one of the highest burnout rates of all career fields. This session will explore some of the leading causes of hospice work burnout and how to prevent it.

11:00am – 11:45am

Bridging Care Gaps: AI in Hospice and Home Health Services

AI is revolutionizing how we provide care, particularly in hospice and home health services. AI enhance caregiver capabilities by streamlining administrative tasks and fostering a more profound focus on delivering empathetic care. Simultaneously, it contributes to cost containment through increased efficiency and optimized resource utilization, ensuring a sustainable and effective healthcare approach. While AI operates predominantly in the background, momentum is building for it to step onto the front lines, engaging in direct and empathetic patient interactions. This session will explore how AI is addressing healthcare challenges, its potential for bridging care gaps, and how it can optimize operations and improve the patient experience.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Value-Based Care: What Hospices Can Learn from Home Health Companies

When it comes to value-based payment models, home health has a head start on hospice. But those providers’ experiences can lend some insights into how hospices can prepare themselves. Hospices are only now taking their first steps into value-based reimbursement. To date, much of this has centered around diversified programs like palliative care, PACE and other services. However, the ongoing value-based insurance design model demonstration and some Accountable Care Organization relationships are giving providers a taste of how at-risk reimbursement may affect their core hospice business. This session will explore important lessons hospices may be able to glean from home health agencies.

12:30pm – 1:30pm

Luncheon

1:30pm – 2:15pm

Technology in Hospice and Home Care: Improving Quality and Adding Resources

Hospice care in rural areas is often characterized by provider shortages and vast geographical service areas to overcome, making access to quality end-of-life care challenging. With care teams fighting to maintain access, minimize cost, and sustain quality measures, telemedicine approaches are being explored as a service to withstand these barriers. As an innovative, community-driven approach, tele-hospice can advance and expand care capabilities while meeting expectations of care that providers and their patients are used to experiencing. This session will explore tele-hospice and the role it plays in assisting hospice and home care teams while being a cost-efficient, but yet quality driven measure in providing care.

2:15pm – 3:15pm

Panel: The Performance Metrics that Drive Value-Based Care Success in Home Health Care

Almost all home health providers want to get into value-based care. Many don’t know where to start.

Performance-based benchmarks like patient satisfaction, timeliness of care and staff efficiency are all metrics you should begin to track diligently. That will come in handy when negotiating value-based care deals in the future. This session will explore performance metrics that drive value-based care success in home health.

3:15pm – 3:45pm

Networking & Refreshments Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm

Home Health and Hospice – A Look at Value-Based Initiatives

By now, we are all familiar with the concepts of value-based care and the transition away from a payment system built primarily on a fee-for-service reimbursement methodology to a patient centered model that focuses on coordinated, high quality, and lower cost care. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to remind us that it expects all Part A and B Medicare beneficiaries to be in a care relationship with accountability for quality and total cost of care by 2030. While a lot of attention is paid to the models focused on primary care attribution, such as the accountable care organizations involved in shared savings models, CMS is also examining value-based care models at two other points along the care continuum: home health and hospice. This session will examine the expanded home health value-based purchasing model.

4:30pm – 5:15pm

Why Care Coordination Is Important for Home Health and Hospice Agencies

A well-designed care coordination process benefits patients, providers and payer organizations. Improved care quality and patient safety, reduced readmissions and ER visits, and lower healthcare costs are just some of the positive outcomes of effective care coordination. Though the benefits are clear, many home health and hospice agencies struggle to optimize coordination. This session will explore strategies to improve care coordination.

5:15pm

End of Day One

Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

Protecting Hospice and Home Care Staff from Workplace Violence

Ensuring staff are educated and trained is crucial for hospices to minimize workplace safety risks, particularly when it comes to providing community-based care. Safety is an ever-present concern for hospice providers in any setting, but the home may be the toughest for employers to help staff navigate. Keeping hospice and home health staff safe while working out in the community is a multifaceted challenge. This session will explore strategies to protect hospice and home care staff from workplace violence.

9:00am – 9:45am

Where Hospices are Seeing the Greatest ROI on Staffing Investments

Amid persistent workforce shortages, sign-on and employee referral bonuses, as well as enhanced benefits, are bearing the most fruit for hospice and home care providers. Though many providers are reporting upward trends when it comes to recruitment and retention, some clinical and administrative vacancies remain pain points. Filling gaps in the hospice workforce has come with hefty financial costs for some providers, but sustainable capacity is a large part of the return on investment. These issues exist throughout the healthcare continuum, meaning that hospices have a broad range of competitors in the labor market. Topics to be discussed will include workforce strategy and ROI and the staffing ROI value equation

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Mass Casualty Triage: Coming Soon to a Hospice Near You?

The role of the hospice and home care sector in mass casualty event management is both vital and rarely understood. Contrary to popular belief, mass casualty event triage does not end at the scene or in an emergency room but can continue in different forms throughout any and all inpatient settings. Because triage can result in some patients’ not receiving the life-supporting care they need, further groundbreaking analysis of the trajectory of triage shows that triage can, and in some cases, must impact hospice units. Topics to be discussed include:

– An introduction to intake and reverse triage and how they relate to the palliative and hospice sectors

– Ethics of triage

– Life support/palliative triage

– Possible public policy solutions to delay the need for life support/palliative triage

11:00am – 11:45am

Suicide Risk Identification and Prevention in Home Healthcare and Hospice Environments: An Original Protocol

Chronically ill patients represent a high-risk population for suicide attempts and completed suicides. Patients being treated primarily for a medical condition often have comorbid behavioral health conditions. Others may be at risk for suicide because of a recent medical diagnosis, a change in clinical status that carries a poor prognosis, or psychosocial issues.  In this session, we’ll discuss how to identify at risk patients, understand dangers to patients and ways to prevent them from harming themselves and or others in home healthcare and hospice environments including:

–           Identifying these patients at risk should be considered an integral part of plan of care

–           Nursing staff may benefit from educational interventions to support patient care

–           Social Worker intervention may be required in certain cases

–           Identifying community resources in advance is primordial to establish care before a crisis occurs

–           Designing a protocol that fits your company and community should be the ultimate goal

11:45am – 12:30pm

Prioritizing Health Equity in Palliative and End-of-Life Care

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light significant health disparities in illness and death due to a person’s race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Also, those factors cause significant inequities in access to palliative and end-of-life care that remain largely unaddressed. The quality of care people receive once they are given a life-threatening diagnosis or as they approach the end of their life depends upon race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and who they love. Such disparities in treatment are unconscionable and must be addressed. This session will explore how we can achieve equal access in palliative and end of life care.

12:30pm

Conference Concludes

Workshop

Hospice-Hospital Collaborations: Making the Case to Hospital Administrators

As healthcare in our country continues to evolve, hospitals and hospital systems maintain their focus on quality improvement and accountability. Hospice and palliative care also continue on the quality improvement pathway. It is important for hospice and palliative care programs to align with the hospitals in providing the highest quality care to patient and families both within the hospital and once they have returned home. Strong sustainable collaborations will assure quality palliative and end-of-life care for both patients and families. This session will present ways in which a hospice organization can align with hospital and hospital system administrators to provide or assist them in assuring quality care for patients approaching the end of life.