NHPCO NewsLine Summer 2017 - 10

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Health Care Today
Health care in 2017 is about patient-centered models
focused around the patient's needs and preferences.
It is about the patient receiving care where he or she
wants to receive care - which in our work is most
often in the home. It is about medical and nonmedical needs. It is about coordination, and
integration and population health.
All I have to say to the rest of the health care world
is "welcome to the party." We were wearing skinny
jeans while everyone else was wearing bell-bottoms.
This is our time to show that a model based on the
teachings and learnings of hospice and palliative
care can provide better care at a lower cost to
millions more.
It seems like we are facing more challenges today
than in the past. And we are. Being a hospice
provider is far more complex than it was three
decades ago. Oversight, scrutiny and increasing
compliance demands are only a few of these things
that concern us all.
We should never forget that with change comes a
valuable opportunity for us to innovate and
continually examine what we do, how we do it, and
what the needs of those we serve are.

Seize the Opportunity...before
somebody else does
Building a strong care continuum is one way to help
people access the care and services they need. Many
of you are providing or exploring how to provide
community-based palliative care services, which is
critically important, but that is not all we should be
limited to...we must think expansively.
We must be at the forefront of efforts to innovate
within our field and to create a seamless continuum
of care for people facing serious and life-limiting
illness. If we are not providing it, someone else will.

NHPCO NewsLine | Summer 2017

Program developers are creating Apps and
Algorithms right now - without us. If we are not
willing to explore and embrace new practices and
collaborative working relationships with others, we
will find ourselves excluded from the continuum.
Hospices must be recognized as the authorities and
experts that we are. We need to take credit for the
work we pioneered and continue to do each and every
day, and we need to be paid for providing that care.

Overcoming Fear - The Heart of Hospice
We have many of the tools and human capital we
need to better integrate hospice and palliative care
into the larger evolution of health care.
Back to Moana. When she conquered the sea and
ventured beyond the reef, she did it with her
ancestors' boats. Those around Moana were afraid.
Concerns and fears are a part to innovation.
There is nothing wrong with being afraid but there
is a problem if we allow our fear to control us. If our
fears keep us from exploring and embracing
necessary change, or cause us to become inert as a
provider community, we not only hurt ourselves but
we hurt the many patients and families that
desperately need the care and services that we are
the best in the world at providing.
Think back to those pioneering days of hospice in the
U.S. when innovators were working in church
basements and out of storefronts - not unlike Bill Gates
and Steve Jobs working out of their garages. (In fact,
many of our pioneers are working in the field today
and we continue to learn from them.) The fear was
palpable, I am sure, but our community has always
been driven by passion and faced those fears. Hospice
innovators changed the way people in this country
faced death. People were the agents of change.
We continue to face fears and challenges to this day. We
find successes and confront failures, and that is okay,

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NHPCO NewsLine Summer 2017