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Sharp’s pre-hospice program saves money

By ANNA GORMAN

For Kaiser Health News

Gerald Chinchar isn’t quite at the end of life, but the end is not far away. The 77-year-old fell twice last year, shattering his hip and femur, and now gets around his San Diego home in a wheelchair. His medications fill a dresser drawer, and congestive heart failure puts him at high risk of emergency room visits and long hospital stays.

Chinchar, a Navy veteran who loves TV Westerns, said that’s the last thing he wants. He still likes to go watch his grandchildren’s sporting events and play blackjack at the casino. “If they told me I had six months to live or go to the hospital and last two years, I’d say leave me home,” Chinchar said. “That ain’t no trade for me.”

Most aging people would choose to stay home in their last years of life. But for many, it doesn’t work out: They go in and out of hospitals, getting treated for flare-ups of various chronic illnesses. It’s a massive problem that costs the health care system billions of dollars and has galvanized health providers, hospital administrators and policymakers to search for solutions.

Sharp HealthCare, the San Diego health system where Chinchar receives care, has devised a way to fulfill his wishes and reduce costs at the same time. It’s a pre-hospice program called Transitions, designed to give elderly patients the care they want at home and keep them out of the hospital.

Social workers and nurses from Sharp regularly visit patients in their homes to explain what they can expect in their final years, help them make end-of-life plans and teach them how to better manage their diseases. Physicians track their health and scrap unnecessary medications. Unlike hospice care, patients don’t need to have a prognosis of six months or less, and they can continue getting curative treatment for their illnesses, not just for symptoms.

Before the Transitions program started, the only option for many patients in a health crisis was to call 911 and be rushed to the emergency room. Now, they have round-the-clock access to nurses, one phone call away.

“Transitions is for just that point where people are starting to realize they can see the end of the road,” said San Diego physician Dan Hoefer, one of the creators of the program. “We are trying to help them through that process so it’s not filled with chaos.”

The importance of programs like Transitions is likely to grow in coming years as 10,000 Baby Boomers — many with multiple chronic diseases — turn 65 every day. Transitions was among the first of its kind, but several such programs, formally known as home-based palliative care, have since opened around the country. They are part of a broader push to improve people’s health and reduce spending through better coordination of care and more treatment outside hospital walls.

But a huge barrier stands in the way of pre-hospice programs: There is no clear way to pay for them. Health providers typically get paid for office visits and procedures, and hospitals still get reimbursed for patients in their beds. The services provided by home-based palliative care don’t fit that model.

In recent years, however, pressure has mounted to continue moving away from traditional payment systems. The Affordable Care Act has established new rules and pilot programs that reward the quality rather than the quantity of care. The health reform law, for example, set up “accountable care organizations” networks of doctors and hospitals that share responsibility for providing care to patients. They also share the savings when they rein in unnecessary spending by keeping people healthier. Those changes are helping to make home-based palliative care a more viable option.

In San Diego, Sharp’s palliative-care program has a strong incentive to reduce the cost of caring for its patients, who are all in Medicare managed care. The nonprofit health organization receives a fixed amount of money per member each month, so it can pocket what it doesn’t spend on hospital stays and other costly medical interventions.

Gerald Chinchar’s medicine is packed in a kitchen drawer for a Sharp HealthCare Transitions program nurse to check. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

‘Something That Works’

Palliative care focuses on relieving patients’ stress, pain and other symptoms as their health declines, and it helps them maintain their quality of life. It’s for people with serious illnesses, such as cancer, dementia and heart failure. The idea is for patients to get palliative care and then move into hospice care, but they don’t always make that transition.

The 2014 report “Dying in America,” by the Institute of Medicine, recommended that all people with serious advanced illness have access to palliative care. Many hospitals now have palliative-care programs, delivered by teams of social workers, chaplains, doctors and nurses, for patients who aren’t yet ready for hospice. But until recently, few such efforts had opened beyond the confines of hospitals.

Kaiser Permanente set out to address this gap. Nearly 20 years ago, it created a home-based palliative care program, testing it in California and later in Hawaii and Colorado. Two studies by Kaiser and others found that participants were far more likely to be satisfied with their care and more likely to die at home than those not in the program. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

One of the studies, published in 2007, found that 36 percent of people receiving palliative care at home were hospitalized in their final months, compared with 59 percent of those getting standard care. The overall cost of care for those who participated in the program was a third less than for those who didn’t.

“We thought, ‘Wow. We have something that works,’” said Susan Enguidanos, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, who worked on both studies. “Immediately we wanted to go and change the world.”

But Enguidanos knew that Kaiser Permanente was unlike most health organizations. It was responsible for both insuring and treating its patients, so it had a clear financial motivation to improve care and control costs. Enguidanos said she talked to medical providers around the nation about this type of palliative care, but the concept didn’t take off at the time. Providers kept asking the same question: How do you pay for it without charging patients or insurers?

“I liken it to paddling out too soon for the wave,” she said. “We were out there too soon. … But we didn’t have the right environment, the right incentive.”

A Bold Idea

Dan Hoefer’s medical office is in the city of El Cajon, which sits in a valley in eastern San Diego County. Hoefer, a former hospice and home health medical director and nursing-home doctor, has spent years treating elderly patients. He learned an important lesson when seeing patients in his office: Despite the medical care they received, “they were far more likely to be admitted to the hospital than make it back to see me.”

When his patients were hospitalized, many would decline quickly. Even if their immediate symptoms were treated successfully, they would sometimes leave the hospital less able to take care of themselves. They would get infections or suffer from delirium. Some would fall.

His patients were like cars with 300,000 miles on them, he said. They had a lot of broken parts. “You can’t just fix one thing and think you have solved the problem,” he said.

And trying to do so can be very costly. About a quarter of all Medicare spending for beneficiaries 65 or older is to treat people in their last year of life, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Hoefer’s colleague, Suzi Johnson, a nurse and administrator in Sharp’s hospice program, saw the opposite side of the equation. Patients admitted into hospice care would make surprising turnarounds once they started getting medical and social support at home and stopped going to the hospital. Some lived longer than doctors had expected.

In 2005, the pair hatched and honed a bold idea: What if they could design a home-based program for patients before they were eligible for hospice?

Thus, Transitions was born. They modeled their new program in part on the Kaiser experiment, then set out to persuade doctors, medical directors and financial officers to try it. But they met resistance from physicians and hospital administrators who were used to getting paid for seeing patients.

“We were doing something that was really revolutionary, that really went against the culture of health care at the time,” Johnson said. “We were inspired by the broken system and the opportunity we saw to fix something.”

Despite the concerns, Sharp’s foundation board gave the pair a $180,000 grant to test out Transitions. And in 2007, they started with heart failure patients and later expanded the program to those with advanced cancer, dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other progressive illnesses. They started to win over some doctors who appreciated having additional eyes on their patients, but they still encountered “some skepticism about whether it was really going to do any good for our patients,” said Jeremy Hogan, a neurologist with Sharp. “It wasn’t really clear to the group … what the purpose of providing a service like this was.”

Nevertheless, Hogan referred some of his dementia patients to the program and quickly realized that the extra support for them and their families meant fewer panicked calls and emergency room trips.

Hoefer said doctors started realizing home-based care made sense for these patients — many of whom were too frail to get to a doctor’s office regularly. “At this point in the patient’s life, we should be bringing health care to the patient, not the other way around,” he said.

Across the country, more doctors, hospitals and insurers are starting to see the value of home-based palliative care and are figuring out how to pay for it, said Kathleen Kerr, a health care consultant who researches palliative care.

“It is picking up steam,” she said. “You know you are going to take better care of this population, and you are absolutely going to have lower health care costs.”

Providers are motivated in part by a growing body of research. A studypublished in January showed that in the last three months of life, medical care for patients in a home-based palliative care program cost $12,000 less than for patients who were getting more typical treatment. Patients in the program also were more likely to go into hospice and to die at home, according to the study.

Two studies of Transitions in 2013 and 2016 reaffirmed that such programs save money. The second study, led by outside evaluators, showed it saved more than $4,200 per month on cancer patients and nearly $3,500 on those with heart failure.

The biggest differences occurred in the final two months of life, said one of the researchers, Brian Cassel, who is palliative care research director at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in Richmond.

One reason for the success of these programs is that the teams really get to know patients, their hopes and aspirations, said Christine Ritchie, a professor at UC San Francisco’s medical school. “There is nothing like being in someone’s home, on their turf, to really understand what their life is like,” she said.


How to close care gaps for patients leaving hospital for home

home

By ANNA GORMAN

for Kaiser Health News

SAN DIEGO

Alton Rodgers had just come in from gardening when he suddenly blacked out and collapsed on the floor. The 89-year-old Kentucky native spent about 10 days at Palomar Hospital, where doctors told him a build-up of fluid around his heart was the culprit.

Now, shortly after being released, Rodgers got a knock at the door.

Nurse Tiffanie Abrajano and social worker Valerie Ellis were there to make sure that his transition to home had gone smoothly. They checked his medications one by one and made sure he knew how to take them. They walked through the house looking for loose rugs and other obstacles that could cause him to fall again. They also asked about safety bars in the bathrooms, and whether he needed a caregiver to help with bathing and dressing.

“We are trying to see if there is anything you might need here in your home to potentially keep you from going to the hospital,” Ellis said. “Do you feel like you have enough assistance?”

“I think I do,” said Rodgers, who lives with a friend. “I feel much stronger… And if I need any help, I can get it.”

For elderly patients like Rodgers, leaving the hospital is fraught with risk. Most are sent home or to nursing facilities after just a few days, still reeling from acute illnesses — not to mention the chronic conditions they are also confronting.

“Just because they have had four days in a hospital doesn’t mean they are better,” said Mary Naylor, a gerontology professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

It’s during that critical time when problems can occur. Patients may get sicker because they don’t have access to medications, transportation, food or crucial equipment such as oxygen tanks. And many don’t have relatives or caregivers to help with the daily tasks that they were able to perform unassisted before being hospitalized.

“There are gaps in care, there are gaps in communication, there are gaps in adequate preparation for patients and families,” said Naylor, who designed a transitions model to address these problems.

In recent years, federal health officials have begun penalizing hospitals for high rates of readmission and sponsoring pilot projects — like the one that sent a social worker and nurse to see Rodgers — to help ensure smoother discharges.

Hospitals and community groups are experimenting with different methods to improve the transition of elderly patients from the hospital.­

Some of them seek to strengthen communication with primary care doctors, or use technology to track patients across different health systems. Others emphasize closer partnerships between hospitals and community groups that provide meal delivery, transportation and other social services.

A program developed at the University of Colorado, for example, follows patients for the first month after their discharge, helping them manage their medications, schedule follow-up appointments and recognize signs of trouble.

San Diego County received a federal grant to improve handoffs from the hospital using an adaptation of the University of Colorado’s program. The county’s Aging and Independence Services agency partnered with four hospital systems — Scripps Health; University of California, San Diego; Palomar Health, and Sharp HealthCare — to serve more than 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries at the highest risk of medical complications after discharge.

The efforts aim to improve care and save money. Poorly managed transitions can waste medical services and increase health care costs. The federal government has estimated that nearly 20 percent of Medicare patients return to the hospital within 30 days, costing more than $26 billion annually.

The penalties and programs around the country are starting to make a dent in the problems associated with poorly handled discharges, experts said. The San Diego County program saved Medicare an estimated $13.8 million over a two-year period between 2013 and 2015, primarily because of reduced hospital readmissions.

But experts are quick to note that more needs to be done. Naylor said providers can’t stop looking after patients just a month after they are discharged.  “It’s not just thinking about today or tomorrow or the next 30 days,” she said. “For chronically ill, older people, what is their long-term trajectory?”

Programs like the one in San Diego County aren’t a panacea. It serves only a portion of Medicare beneficiaries, and people aren’t eligible for the help while they are in a nursing facility.

John Statler, 88, for example, returned to the emergency room at Palomar Hospital three times within the first week of his discharge to a nursing home. Statler had spent several days at the hospital after a fall left him with a severe head wound. His daughter said that the hospital saved his life but didn’t then ensure that he had what he needed to recover after being discharged. In the end, he had to be readmitted.

Transition difficulties often start for elderly patients when they’re preparing to be discharged from the hospital. That’s when medical staffers quickly read a list of instructions to patients and hand them new prescriptions. Older patients may not understand what they are being told because they have dementia or are weakened and confused from their time in the hospital. Some are simply anxious to leave and not paying close attention.

“You are trying to reach them and do that education at such a critical time, but they are nowhere near cognitively ready to receive that,” said Joe Parker, lead nurse of care transitions at Palomar Health. “And we don’t have the luxury of time to wait.”

Back at home, family members and caregivers are often asked to take on medical tasks that would make “most first-year RNs shake in their boots,” said Robyn Golden, director of health and aging at Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago. That can lead to medication mix-ups, infections and other problems — especially since the average hospital stay has shrunk.

“People are going home sicker, quicker and they are not returning to their prior selves as quickly – if at all,” Golden said.

Adding to the potential complications is the fact that primary care doctors are often unaware their elderly patients are in the hospital, so they can’t step in to ensure treatment plans are followed.

The main issue the San Diego program is designed to address is the disconnect between hospitals and social services agencies, which have traditionally operated in separate silos, San Diego County and hospital officials said.

“There is a point where the hospital can’t do any more” for patients who have been discharged, said Cecile Davis, coordinator of the remote patient monitoring for Sharp HealthCare. “The key is to know when to turn them over to the community.”

To figure out what patients like Alton Rodgers need, nurses and social workers ask critical questions, said Carol Castillon, who manages the care transitions program for the county.

Do they have transportation to get to the doctor? Do they understand their medications? Do they need an in-home caregiver?

The over-arching question, Castillon said, is: “What are the long-term services we can bring in so that this person isn’t coming back to the hospital?”

Castillon said that before starting the project with the hospitals, the county regularly found older people in their homes who had been recently discharged and were unable to care for themselves. “They were sick, they were unable to get medications, they didn’t have food,” she said.

Participating hospitals identify patients for the program before they are discharged.

At Palomar Hospital one spring day, nurses Patrice Gadd and Rachel Ricchio stood at the bedside of 88-year-old Joseph Taylor, a former physical therapist who had come to the hospital with pneumonia and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

Gadd told him that he could get a home visit and a month of follow-up to help keep him out of the hospital. Taylor and his wife, who had recently moved from Colorado, both agreed that any help would be welcome.

Gadd urged Taylor to call the doctor if he started feeling sick again.  “The problem is that the older we get, the less reserves we have in our gas tank,” she said. Things “can go south really, really quickly.”

Nearly three months after his hospitalization, however, Taylor hadn’t returned to the hospital.


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