An APCO Developing in Asheville?

In a recent post (read here), I commented about the exemplary results of Asheville, North Carolina in the DAI Community Palliative Performance Profile. To learn more, we interviewed Janet Bull, MD, VP of Medical Services for a not-for-profit hospice (Four Seasons) serving the Asheville area.

Some excerpts:

"We are very heavy in physician staffing, and think that is a good real positive," with the physicians mainly out making billable visits to hospice patients and serving as attendings or consultants on about 80 percent of patients enrolled in hospice care, she explains. "They actually paid for themselves last year."

Essential to the palliative care program's success was being clear on what kinds of patients it would see -- or not see. Dr. Bull continues, "We learned early on that we can't be all things to all people. We didn't want to be a chronic pain service or post-acute, post-surgical consultants. We wanted to stay focused on serious, advanced illness, generally for patients with three years or less to live. At Four Seasons, we are all about delivering quality care and looking at measurable outcomes. We take our patient and family satisfaction surveys very seriously.The program emphasizes continuity of care across care settings. From the get-go, we saw patients where they were, and we followed them from one setting to the next."

Integrating the hospice and palliative care departments was also a priority. "Many organizations bump up against the problem of palliative care being viewed as a step-child to hospice. Here we value the great things palliative care brings, and how it complements hospice," Dr. Bull says."We consider ourselves one big team, whether palliative care or hospice, with a lot of interface between the two. Patients can flow both ways between these programs. We used an explicit strategy of building the connections between the two. Some employees serve both programs, and we share resources and administrative tasks, integrating them whenever we can," she reports. "Often at staff meetings we'll have presentations by palliative care leadership or providers, explaining their work to hospice staff. We focus on education, both internally and externally, explaining the differences between hospice and palliative care, and how they complement each other. We inform patients that hospice offers many more services than palliative care."

Seems to me that what we're seeing in Asheville is the early development of an Accountable Palliative Care Organization, led by a chief palliative care officer for the community. Surely, there are other factors contributing to Asheville's performance, but just as surely one cannot underestimate the value of a strong and well-developed medical staff of HPM specialists.