Private Equity Gobbling Up Hospices plus Hospice and Dementia: Melissa Aldridge, Krista Harrison, & Lauren Hunt
Two major shifts are transforming the landscape of hospice.
First, private equity firms are gobbling up hospices.\xa0 As Melissa Aldridge, a health services researcher and former banker explains, we should be very concerned.\xa0 Private equity firms try to turn companies as profitable as possible within 3-5 years.\xa0 Thus, they have little in the way of long term vision for hospices, instead focused on cutting costs and maximizing profits.\xa0
Second, Hospice was originally designed for patients with advanced cancer, but the fastest growing admitting diagnosis is dementia.\xa0 People with dementia make up about half of hospice admissions.\xa0 And yet, we know little about the clinical experience of people with dementia in hospice.\xa0 Krista Harrison found, to her surprise, that caregivers of people with dementia who died rated hospice as well as similar patients without dementia who died on hospice.\xa0 And yet, disenrollment from hospice, either due to patient/family revoking the benefit or stabilization of illness (extended prognosis) is remarkably high for people with dementia among some hospices.\xa0 In fact, as Lauren Hunt found, the average likelihood that a person will be disenrolled from one hospice vs. another is two. In other words, which hospice you enroll in has a tremendous influence on whether you\u2019re going to be disenrolled from hospice, which often feels to patients and families like being expelled.
And I had a blast playing Take the Money and Run!
-@AlexSmithMD