Partners In Care, Summit Health Join Forces on Palliative Care

Partners In Care has formed a strategic partnership with the primary and urgent care provider Summit Health aimed at increasing access to palliative care in Central Oregon.

Beginning this July, Summit Health patients will have access to palliative care consultations and expanded services through the partnership. 

This is not the first collaboration between the two organizations. In 2014, Partners In Care began offering palliative care services to patients of Summit Health’s oncology department at the Eastside Clinic in Bend, Oregon. The new partnership expands palliative care across Summit Health’s other departments, including cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology and primary care. 

Advertisement

Witnessing the success of that oncology collaboration led physicians in other Summit departments to recognize the benefits of offering palliative care, according to Partners In Care CEO Greg Hagfors.

Several other factors were also at play, Hagfors indicated.

“Partners In Care and Summit Health were longtime partners in end-of-life care in the region so the formation of a formal agreement was a natural evolution in this relationship,” Hagfors told Hospice News in an email. “The palliative care team at Partners In Care expanded to include a physician, nurse practitioner, registered nurse and chaplain, which rounded out the multidisciplinary team approach they could offer patients.”

Advertisement

Partners In Care offers palliative, home health and community- and facility-based hospice care, among other services. The nonprofit provider was founded in 1979 as an all-volunteer hospice known as Friends of Hospice and now serves a 10,000-square-mile market in Central Oregon.

The company recently tapped Greg Hagfors as its new CEO following the retirement of Eric Alexander. Hagfors previously served as CEO of the Bend Memorial Clinic – now known as Summit Health – from 2011 to 2016.

Summit Health offers primary, urgent and specialty care services, including palliative care. Summit Health’s more than 2,500 providers operate across 340 locations in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon. The company has more than 150 providers and nine locations in the Beaver State alone.

Another driver of the partnership was when Summit Health became its own accountable care organization (ACO) and wanted to add palliative care as part of its “medical home,” according to Hagfors. 

Summit Health will take over all billing for reimbursement as part of the total patient account, Hagfors stated. This allows Summit to schedule and bill for palliative care services, reducing expense on the Partners In Care side and reducing redundancy in recordkeeping, he continued.

Through the partnership, Summit Health patients will now have access to palliative care consultations by Partners In Care clinicians. The two providers will use a central medical record platform to further improve care coordination. Additionally, a nurse navigator will be assigned to aid in the coordination and logistics of providing palliative care.

The partnership will “dramatically enhance” quality and coordination while also lowering the total cost of care, according to Summit Health CEO Justin Sivill.

Establishing a professional palliative care agreement is a benefit for current and future patients, including greater availability of those services, according to Hagfors.

“Palliative care specialists spend time with a patient and family to help them match their treatment options to their goals,” Hagfors said. “Palliative and hospice care are value-based care that reduces cost burden throughout the health care system.”

Eligible patients for the palliative care program will include those suffering from cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), among others.

Expanding palliative care across multiple departments will drive up physician awareness and patient access of these services, according to Jennifer Blechman, M.D., hospice and palliative care physician at Partners in Care. Blechman leads the clinic’s palliative care team.

“I am looking forward to this expansion that will allow us to reach many more patients further upstream in their disease trajectory,” Blechman said in an announcement. “We are thrilled to become an even stronger partner with each out-patient department, as well as to strengthen our collaboration with Summit Health’s hospitalist and skilled nursing facility care teams.” 

Seniors represent 18.6% of Oregon’s overall population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which in 2020 ranked the state 11th nationwide for its percentage of adults 65 and older. One in five people statewide will be seniors by 2030, projected the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis.

Despite a growing aging population swelling demand for palliative care, these services are widely underutilized. Reasons have included a lack of a standardized palliative care definition, quality measures and reimbursement structure, along with a shortage of trained clinicians. As a result, the quality and delivery of palliative care patients and families receive varies from region to region nationwide.

Reaching patients with serious and progressive illness earlier in the trajectory of their disease will help avoid futile care and costly or unwanted treatments, Hagfors told Hospice News.

Companies featured in this article:

, ,