CAPC Palliative Care Program Spotlight

Our latest guest on the Palliative Care Program Spotlight is Doctor Parag Bharadwaj. Parag is Chief of Palliative Care Medicine at Sentara Health in Norfolk, Virginia. In this conversation, Parag discusses his challenges with hiring the right staff and shares some of his recipes for keeping staff engaged for the long term.

Our guest on this episode is Greg Kimura, Director of Palliative Care for Monarch Healthcare in Orange County, California. In this engaging chat, Greg discusses caring for patients through the continuum of care as well as the importance of patient satisfaction and physician training.

In this episode we chat with Abi Katz, Medical Director of Advanced Illness Management at Fidelity Health Care and Premier Health. In this conversation, Abi breaks down the ways her palliative care programs use data to assess their biggest issues such as finding the right consults, staffing properly, and showing their value to institutional leaders. Abi has a lot to teach us about maximizing the return on investment of collecting impactful data.

How do you create a palliative care culture at an institution when there isn't one? How do you take the idea of palliative care and turn that into a real program that meets the needs of its patients? For the answers, we turned to Dr. Alexander Gamble, the Medical Director of Supportive Care at Phelps County Regional Medical Center in Rolla, Missouri. In this chat, Dr. Gamble discusses how he is growing a palliative care team from the ground up. Host Dan Altano and Dr. Gamble also chat about building lasting relationships with referring clinicians and the challenges of branching out into the rural setting. .

Our guest in this episode of the Program Spotlight is Kristin Edwards who oversees the palliative care service line at Bridgeport Hospital, within a multisite hospital system. Responsible for clinical supervision, hospital staff education, as well as metrics and measurement, Kristin has a lot to share about building lasting relationships with referring clinicians. In this episode, Kristin shares successes in attracting the right referrals, breaks down her lessons learned in building an outpatient palliative care business plan, and details how she's scaling up to deliver palliative care to the patients who need it most.

Our guests on this episode are Dr. Ira Byock and Dr. Kevin Murphy of the Institute for Human Caring of Providence St. Joseph Health. In this chat, Ira and Kevin discuss bringing uniformity to all palliative care programs at this 50 hospital health system serving communities across 7 states. The interview, which took place at the 2017 CAPC National Seminar, touches upon several key topics such as making the business case for palliative care, the importance of educating all clinicians in palliative care skills, and creating a health system culture that stays true to its core values.

Lori Yosick, Director for Community Palliative Care at Trinity Health, is one of the country's leading experts in palliative care. In addition to running the program at Trinity, Lori spends her time helping palliative care programs of all sizes extend their inpatient services to the outpatient setting. In this chat, Lori breaks down her top tips for starting, growing, and sustaining an outpatient program. Lori also discusses how her own missteps in starting an outpatient program taught her the valuable lesson of planning ahead before getting started.

Welcome back to the palliative care program spotlight. In this episode, we're talking about the challenges of growing and sustaining a palliative care program in the community setting. Our guest is Nancy Jackson—Director of Community Development for Home Hospice of Grayson County in Sherman, TX. In our conversation, Nancy discusses the needs assessment process, building a business model, and partnering up with like-minded organizations to help start a palliative care program in the community.

A common issue palliative care programs face is finding the time to collect and leverage data. It's hard enough to reach the growing needs of patients let alone stepping back and analyzing the metrics that matter to your team or institution at large. On our hunt to find some programs who have made the investment into data, we crossed paths with Christine Swift, an MSN, CHPN, CCRN, and Manager of the Palliative Care Service at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, California. In this episode, Christine discusses how data has helped her team reach new heights and plan for the future.

For those of you who have listened back to previous episodes you know that some of the same hot button issues keep emerging in these chats. One of those issues is finding the right payment model for your program especially in the face of potential changes to our health care system. This episode features a two-part conversation with David Ross Russell, MD of ProHealth Physicians in Connecticut. David is a family physician who was trained in the UK and came to the states 29 years ago. He's been a palliative care doctor as well as a primary care doctor throughout his entire career and is currently running the palliative care program within ProHealth. In part 1, David and host Dan Altano discuss finding the right patients, payment, and getting institutional buy-in to care for a growing need. In part 2, David discusses some of the program's successes and challenges in expanding into the community and goes further into payment billing and payment. Enjoy!