Categories: Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service

The Need for Quality Hospice Triage

Hospice triage provides an opportunity for care providers to understand a patient’s needs and meet them in the best time frame. Our team of operators helps both individuals and hospice providers find the best solutions for quality hospice triage care.

What Is Hospice?

In a nutshell, hospice is a service catered to the terminally ill, providing comfort where possible and improving the quality of a patient’s last few months of life. Hospice care typically lasts about four to six months per the life expectancy of the patient. Fortunately, the service is almost always covered by Medicaid and is provided in-home or wherever the patient lives, be it nursing home, specialized living community, or private residence.

Hospice can be beneficial to patients suffering from a host of conditions and diseases, commonly including cancer, dementia, stroke, heart disease, lung disease, chronic kidney disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). Hospice patients need not be bedridden, for the purpose of hospice care is to provide what comfort can be offered to make the final months of life bearable.

Hospice offers access to a team of professionals of many disciplines trained to provide physical, psychosocial, and spiritual care according to patient need. Hospice eligibility is determined by a hospice physician and the patient’s attending physician or specialist mutually certifying that the patient in question meets hospice-specific medical criteria, usually that the patient’s life expectancy is six months or less if his or her condition runs its natural course. 

What Hospice Is Not

The focus of hospice is to make those last few months as comfortable as possible. It is not curative-based, nor is it a measure for finding medical innovation to prolong life. At the other end of the spectrum, it is not a means of expediting death either. It is not a treatment plan of any kind. The availability of caring hospice professionals is 24/7, but hospice itself is not usually a bedside service. It is not a replacement for a nursing home or care center as it is designed for the terminally ill and to last no longer than six months.

Hospice Triage Services

Since 2000, the hospice industry has quadrupled in size. The demand for care has increased at a rate that care facilities cannot keep apace with. That is why CareXM offers telehealth hospice triage services. Our operators aid providers to reduce the risk of burnout in staff by fielding phone calls, providing accurate, and scheduling appointments resources to hospice patients and their loved ones.

Message Reporting

There is no reason for patients and those that care about them to be kept in the dark about patients’ conditions. With our message reporting services, we keep you informed to minimize worry. We prioritize documented records of hospice communication.

On-Call Scheduling

CareXM establishes an interface with your EMR system so that you can remain connected to your hospice provider. We offer seamless scheduling so that you get the care you need without missing a beat.

Direct Text Messaging

Our direct text messaging service keeps you informed with a whole new level of ease. It allows for communication that is direct and instantaneous.

Why Choose CareXM?

CareXM offers hospice triage services that benefit both patient and provider. Our team is customer-oriented to reduce the rampant frustration of automated phone answering services, and our operators are available 24/7 for the benefit of those needing immediate care. If you are a provider, you can rest easy knowing that your hospice practice will not miss any calls.

We understand the very real problem that arises when hospice employees feel overtaxed and fatigued, which can occur if they must take on hospice triage as well as the care itself. Our goal is to reduce that burnout and turnover, thus allowing you to provide better care to patients and improve operations overall. We accomplish that objective through three avenues:

Custom Programing

Our team meets with your staff to identify current challenges and to design strategies best fitted to address them.

Staff Support and Training

Our operators manage your telephone triage system to provide your nursing staff with the requisite details so they can do what they are best at and offer quality care to patients. This kind of delegation allows for a streamlined business model and increased response times. 

Risk Management

Our team offers solutions that comply with hospice triage protocols and telehealth nursing standards. With an objective and professional eye, we can identify aspects of business models and staff behavior that cause undue strain on your team, and with that assessment we will work with you to create plans to improve processes to improve operations.