CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Forget that image of a hospice worker sitting next to a hospital bed in a dimly lit room. Today, hospice care is delivered everywhere from the golf course to the casino.
As they brace for the eventual needs of the aging baby boom generation, hospice providers are working to diversify their services and dispel misconceptions about what they do.
Chief among those myths is the notion that hospice consists of friendly visitors who sit in a darkened room and hold Grandma’s hand while she dies, says Robin Stawasz, family services director at Southern Tier Hospice and Palliative Care in upstate New York.
“It’s just not what we do. We come in and help people go golfing or go snowbird down to Florida, or go out to dinner several nights a week. We help them get to the casinos on weekends,” she said. “This is not getting ready to die. This is living — living now, living tomorrow, making the best possible life with what you have.”
According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, an estimated 1.58 million patients received hospice care from more than 5,000 programs nationwide in 2010, more than double the number of patients served a decade earlier. More than 40 percent of all deaths in the United States that year were under the care of hospice, which provides medical care, pain management, and emotional and spiritual support to patients with terminal illnesses.
Both figures have grown steadily and are expected to rise as baby boomers — the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — get older.
“It’s a complicated time and an exciting time, but it’s also, in many ways, going to be a very daunting time for hospices to try to find ways to take care of all these people,” said Donald Schumacher, president and CEO of the national hospice group.
For the vast majority of patients, hospice means periodic visits at home from a team of hospice workers. A much smaller percentage receives continuous nursing care at home or inpatient care at a hospice house.
Hospice is covered under Medicare, Medicaid, and most private health insurance plans. According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, 84 percent of patients receiving hospice care in 2010 were covered by Medicare. The vast majority of those patients received routine home care — visits from hospice workers as opposed to around-the-clock nursing care or inpatient care — and at that level of care, the Medicare reimbursement was about $126 per day, according to the organization.
Medicare covers hospice care if a doctor determines someone has less than six months to live and if the patient forgoes any further life-prolonging treatment, though under the new federal health care overhaul law, it will experiment with covering both curative and supportive care at a number of test sites nationwide.
In the meantime, hospice programs are growing in number and scope. Recognizing that people are living longer and with complex illnesses, they’ve been branching out into other “pre-hospice” areas for patients who are not terminally ill. For example, some centers have become certified as so-called PACE providers, an acronym that stands for “program of all-inclusive care for the elderly.”
“Hospices are trying to throw a broader net out to provide services to people before they become eligible for hospice,” Schumacher said.
Another trend is focusing on patients with specific diagnoses. While hospices for decades overwhelmingly cared for people with cancer, by 2010, cancer diagnoses had dropped to 36 percent of patients served, prompting some centers to develop programs geared toward heart disease, dementia and other diagnoses.
“We are realizing that while our roots were really in oncology, that model is not the best response for all patients,” Stawasz said. “We needed to really look again at how we were doing things. It is not a one-size-fits-all kind of treatment plan,” she said.
After working with providers and patients to figure out where traditional hospice had been missing the mark, Stawasz’s agency launched its specialized program for patients who have suffered heart failure in 2009. While there’s usually a clear line between medical treatment and comfort care for cancer patients, things get blurry with other conditions, she said. So the agency started focusing on the reason behind each service, rather than the service itself.