Purpose and Context
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For the past four decades, long before the current health care system’s transition to coordinated
care and value-based payment,
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hospice has been coordinating care among different clinical
disciplines, providers and caregivers to deliver an integrated program of supportive and palliative
care to the dying. Hospice is the only care modality in which
the focus is to care for both the patient and the family. In
fact, hospice care is often referred to as one of the nation’s
first “coordinated care” programs.
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Care is person-centered,
with patients’ wishes being respected.
Its proponents point out that in addition to its widely
recognized clinical benefits, hospice care’s potential for cost
savings stems from two factors: 1) the U.S. hospice model
emphasizes end-of-life care at home and treatments
provided in the home setting are generally less costly than
those provided in the inpatient setting; and 2) hospice care
focuses on proactive symptom management that is less
medically aggressive than conventional curative treatments.
Hospice care involves less rigorous use of expensive and
often debilitating and painful ancillary services which all add to quality of life.
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Qualitative and quantitative research, as well as numerous patient experiences, demonstrate
the benefits of the hospice program to enrollees and their family members, as well as its cost-
effectiveness to Medicare, its primary payer.
In 1979, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the John A. Hartford Foundation,
together with the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA)
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– now the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) funded a demonstration project, the National
Hospice Study, to “compare patients served in hospital-based and home-based hospices
with terminal cancer patients receiving care from a variety of conventional (nonhospice)
oncological-care settings.”
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The intent of the demonstration was to determine which care
models best incorporate the hospice concept.
The National Hospice Study (NHS) aimed to determine the cost-effectiveness of providing
hospice care to terminally ill Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Brown University was
selected to evaluate the program under the direction of Vincent Mor, Ph.D. The evaluation
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As exemplified by the launch of Accountable Care Organizations in 2011, the implementation of the Bundled Payments for Care
Improvement (BPCI) initiative in 2013, as well as the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014.
7
Banach, Edo. Coordinated Care Is More Than a Buzzword for Hospice Providers. National Hospice and Palliative Care
Organization (NHPCO). April 24, 2018. https://www.nhpco.org/press-room/press-releases/op-ed-coordinated-care
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Mor, V., Greer, DS., and Kastenbaum, R. The Hospice Experiment. 1988. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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HCFA was the name for CMS beginning in 1977.
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Mor, V., Greer, DS., and Kastenbaum, R. The Hospice Experiment. 1988. The Johns Hopkins University Press
“Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes
only a salve, sometimes not even that. But
whatever we can offer, our interventions, and
the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified
only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s
life. When we forget that, the suffering we
inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it
the good we do can be breathtaking.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and
What Matters in the End