Valor HospiceCare & The Valor Institute for Palliative Medicine Specialized Programs

Valor DoctorCaretm Program

Led by our Medical team and through our Valor Institute, our "Philosophy of Care" is focused on changing and enhancing the way hospice is organized, planned and delivered in our markets. As an innovative leader in evidence-based approaches to palliative care, we are uniquely positioned to utilize cutting-edge research from our programs to support the health care community.

Please utilize the following guides:

NEW! To view and print our Physicians Billing Guide, please click here.

NEW! To view and print our Nurse Practitioners Billing Guide, please click here.

To view and print Common Misconceptions - Barriers to Hospice Care, please click here.

To view and print our Hospice Referral Reference Guide for functional assessment staging and hospice prognosis criteria, please click here.

To view and print our Physician & Hospice Terminology Guide, please click here.

To view and print our Valor DoctorCaretm Program overview, please click here.

Your trusted partner for the best in hospice and palliative care.

Our entire goal with working with Physicians and other healthcare providers, is to provide increased value by assisting them with their intensive workloads. In other words, to make life easier for assisting with their patients.

Working with referring medical providers in the community, Valor HospiceCare & The Valor Institute for Palliative Medicine has developed a program to provide additional services to educate, support and assist with their clinical programs. Many services are offered to assist with the medical community's efforts for increasing awareness and education for end-of-life services.

The most common response to our satisfaction surveys: "I wish our doctor would have talked to us sooner about your hospice care services."

Further, in coordination with our Valor PalliativeCare program, working with Primary Physicians and Nurse Practitioners for hospice patients in our program, our Medical Directors are available for palliative care evaluations for hospice eligibility and consultations for pain control and symptom management.

Contact Us Today for Assistance with Decision Criteria for Patient Referrals! Our Medical Directors and Qualified Hospice Staff are Available for Pre-Hospice Evaluations

How Does Hospice Help Physicians?

· Patients and families are grateful for the help and support by Physicians
· Hospice staff are highly trained in palliative care and closely assess your patient's needs in order to help you manage your patient at home
· Hospice is an extension of care and allows you to continue to see your patients and get reimbursed for your services for non-diagnosis services
· Valor provides Billing Guides for reimbursement, including other useful tools to assist with understanding the hospice benefit
· The hospice full interdisciplinary approach not available anywhere else in health care
· As part of the hospice team, the Medical Director can assist Physicians or Nurse Practitioners, or assume total management of the patient in providing aggressive pain management and non-pain symptom management
· Our hospice Medical Directors and Nurse Practitioners will make home visits, as part of our PalliativeCare Program
· Hospice is able to provide 24-hour professional services in our authorized Inpatient Facilities

For medical professionals, contact us regarding Hospice training for Advance Care Planning and Education on Palliative and End-of-Life Care (EPEC) seminars or UNIPAC, hospice/palliative care training for Physicians.

Please click on the following website links for further program information.

      
   

Additional DoctorCare Information from Medicare

Physicians and other health care providers' awareness and attitudes about death and dying influence the use of the Medicare Hospice Benefit (MHB) as well as end-of-life care. So much so, that the need for greater professional understanding of options for end-of-life care, including hospice, has been highlighted in several recent congressional hearings and in other public forums. The need for physician education in end-of-life care is prevalent and one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is convincing current and future physicians that dying and death is not a medical failure. The operative question is how do we do that? Public awareness of the need for quality end-of-life care is growing and as such, several medical societies, patient advocacy groups, and the hospice industry have undertaken a variety of efforts to educate their members and the public about end-of-life care options. These initiatives are consumer driven and as the public becomes more aware of end-of-life care needs, they will demand that their health care providers be able to provide them with quality end-of-life care.

In addition, several physician associations have taken steps to increase physician awareness (current and future) about end-of-life care through the following initiatives:

· Hospice and Palliative Medicine has been unanimously approved by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) as a subspecialty of Internal Medicine. The aim of palliative care is to assist patients and their families with the emotional and physical anguish of chronic illness, especially as they approach the end stages of life. These efforts have helped raise the standards of clinical care, education and scholarship in the field and helped make specialty status possible. As a result of the subspecialty designation, patients and their families will have more choices about how to make decisions in the face of serious illnesses, and physicians will be trained to provide the most compassionate and patient-centered care possible. This specialty status will create an impetus on a national level to improve medical student and resident education, and will create opportunities for fellowship training support from Medicare - something that is only available to ABMS-approved specialties. The ABMS is the umbrella organization for the approved medical subspecialty boards in the United States. Its recognition of Hospice and Palliative Medicine as a subspecialty implies that the field requires a unique body of knowledge and symptom management and communication skills different from existing specialties.
· The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), which certifies internists, now requires residency training to focus on care of the dying. The ABIM has developed a guide for these residency programs to define physician competence in end-of-life care, to include a focus on good pain management. That means that residency programs will have to place more emphasis on end-of-life care issues and provide more training opportunities in hospice and home care settings.
· The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has been encouraging medical schools to change their curriculums to graduate more humane, empathetic, and highly skilled physicians. The AAMC is also helping schools develop outcome measures that address communication skills, including the ability to talk with patients about end-of-life care issues. Currently, there are approximately sixteen medical schools in the United States that currently have palliative care and/or end-of-life curriculums in place.
· A central repository for educational materials and information about end-of-life care issues has been developed to assist physician educators and others in locating high-quality, peer-reviewed training materials. This repository, The End of Life Physician Education Resource Center (EPERC) is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is located at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

In conclusion, the use of hospice services by Medicare beneficiaries requires not just awareness of the benefit and a physician's certification of prognosis, but also acceptance that death is the outcome of their illness.

Please contact us today at 877.615.3996 or info@valorhospicecare.com for further information about our services and programs.