Developing and financing a palliative care program.

Although hospice care to assist the dying is widely available, palliative care, which focuses on living with chronic and life threatening illness and preparing the living for dying, is poorly understood. Only recently, palliative care has been mandated by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations as a necessary intervention for facilities. Defining a palliative care model for the community hospital emphasizes total care for the patient beyond the traditional medical model. No specific Medicare reimbursement exists for palliative care in hospitals, and hospital administrators are generally not supportive of programs where no reimbursement exists. Developing a model palliative care program using a cost aversion financial model to quantify benefits of a palliative care programs is one strategy to address the reimbursement shortcomings.