BACKGROUND: Increasing hospice need, a growing shortage of hospice providers, and concerns about in-person services due to COVID-19 require hospices to innovate care delivery. MEASURES: This project compared outcomes between hospice reauthorization visits conducted via telehealth and in-person. After each visit, providers, patients and caregivers completed telehealth acceptance surveys, and providers recorded reauthorization recommendations. INTERVENTION: Providers conducted 88 concurrent in-person and telehealth visits between June and November, 2019. OUTCOMES: No statistically significant differences in reauthorization recommendations were found between telehealth and in-person visits. Satisfaction with telehealth was high; 88% of patients/caregivers and 78% of providers found telehealth services as effective as in-person visits. CONCLUSIONS/LESSONS LEARNED: Results indicate that telehealth can successfully support clinical decision making for hospice reauthorization. These findings show telehealth to be reliable and acceptable for certain types of hospice care even prior to COVID-19, which emphasizes its importance both during and after the current public health emergency.
Using telehealth for hospice reauthorization visits: results of a quality improvement analysis