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Medicare's Hospice Pilot Program Could Improve End Of Life Care

Under Medicare’s current rules, a person who goes on hospice has to stop any curative care they might be receiving, like dialysis or chemotherapy. But now, a nationwide pilot program is looking to see if the old way of doing things really works. 

It’s called the Medicare Care Choices Model. The idea is to allow a select group of seriously ill people to receive hospice services without giving up their regular care. Barbara Volk-Craft is with Hospice of the Valley. HOV is the only hospice provider in the state that’s participating in the program.

"The idea came from Medicare from the innovation center… and found that there was a group of Medicare beneficiaries who although they were eligible for hospice weren’t seeking hospice care at the end of their life, they were ending up going to the hospital and dying in the hospital; what we call the terminal hospitalization or that terminal hospital event."

Dr. Ed Clarke is with the Arizona Care Network, which is collaborating with HOV on the pilot.

"A high percentage dollars of health care are spent in the last and final weeks of life."

And that’s due, in large part, to hospitalizations.

Besides improving a person’s quality of care at the end of life, both Clarke and Volk-Craft say there’s a chance it will save Medicare money.

"They’re looking at the cost of this added payment to a hospice, plus all the payments in the community and can that be offset by some other savings such as a hospitalization that’s avoided," said Volk-Craft.

And that’s significant. Last week, a government report warned that Medicare will become insolvent by 2026. 

KJZZ senior field correspondent Kathy Ritchie has 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local media outlets — nearly a decade of it has been spent in public media.