But hospice solutions can help a range of healthcare providers improve care and meet industry standards, says Erika Gaudio, senior vice president of sales for Miami-based VITAS® Healthcare, the nation’s leading provider of end-of-life care.

 

During her 10-year tenure at VITAS, Gaudio and her team have created successful hospice-provider partnerships throughout South Florida by leveraging knowledge, data and targeted solutions, and by asking key questions of hospitals and health systems, physician practices, capitated organizations, nursing and assisted-living facilities, health plans/private insurers, accountable care organizations, home healthcare agencies and BCPI Advanced participants. How can hospice:

• Improve your delivery of high-quality, cost-effective healthcare?

• Help you meet ever-changing industry benchmarks and metrics?

• Generate high satisfaction among patients and their families?

• Bridge care gaps and solve your organization’s most pressing problems?

 

As Gaudio and her team educate, guide and offer solutions, they also support common tasks faced by all healthcare professionals:

• Improved prognostication to make sure seriously ill patients are referred to hospice in a timely manner.

• Improved comfort level managing difficult patient-family conversations that acknowledge ongoing decline and changes in symptoms, diagnoses and prognoses.

• Access to data, knowledge and expertise that deepens understanding of hospice’s benefits and value proposition for their organization, patients and families.

 

Under Gaudio’s leadership, VITAS has strengthened its internal process so that representatives understand prospective partners’ challenges and pain points, can leverage internal/external data and industry studies, and become trusted subject matter experts on leading hospice diagnoses.

 

Detailed patient case studies and information about hospice eligibility, proper timing of end-of-life interventions and the benefits of timely and compassionate hospice care, she says, are tailored to answer potential partners’ questions and to identify problem-solving solutions.