Practice Group
Hospice and Palliative Care
Building and maintaining successful agencies through effective administration, revenue and compliance
Providing hospice and related palliative care services presents a unique and complex set of circumstances for healthcare workers. With shrinking margins and the challenge of maintaining a strong, loyal workforce these challenges can lead to poor financial performance, colleague burnout and poor outcomes for patients or residents, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Granite GRC provides you and your staff with the insights, strategies and tools you need to navigate these challenges and lead the way to a culture of excellence, high worker satisfaction, and outstanding care.
Granite GRC’s Hospice Practice Group works with healthcare providers, physicians, assisted living facilities, hospitals and others to effectively support team members and to achieve strong performance for patients’ medical conditions, sustained needs, and palliative care.
Rising to the Challenges
Meeting growing demands for these services magnifies the importance of each agency’s operational, financial and compliance capabilities. Organizations who have instituted effective revenue cycle management, are operationally and technologically sound, and have scalable, compliant business practices will be situated to capitalize on these opportunities.
Our dedicated team is highly experienced in all facets of administrative operations, frontline care and compliance. We are committed to providing you and your staff the tools, strategies and best practices to obtain appropriate payment for your services, elevate your quality of care, help leadership and staff set and achieve their goals, streamline operations for greater efficiencies, improve morale and communication, reduce turnover, and so much more.
“A survey of over 170 hospice agencies explored the challenges hospices face in meeting their compliance obligations. Nearly half of all respondents expressed uncertainty they would be able to survive an audit. This survey also showed clinical documentation to be a key area of vulnerability.”
– from Linda Martien, Director, Home Health and Hospice Services
Addressing Needs and Challenges
Our team of experienced hospice and palliative care consultants has identified the five most common challenges for hospice agencies across the country. These challenges include:
- Attracting and retaining talented staff
- The Patient-Driven-Groupings Model (PDGM)
- An increase in Low Utilization Payment Adjustments (LUPA)
- Poor documentation and improper coding
- Hospice Carve-in
We’ll work with your staff and train them using proven methods, while holding ourselves accountable during the process.
- We assess and immerse ourselves in your revenue cycle, including your claims, practices and procedures, identifying risks, non-compliance issues and areas needing improvement
- We assess your deliverables and financial results, comparing them to other, similar organizations to identify areas of potential advantage or concern
- We develop strategies and training schedules to help your team make and meet goals
- We fortify your staff with the tools to improve operations and understand the best way to implement these strategies
Trusted Guidance, Hands-On Approach
We fully assess your most pressing challenges and provide recommendations in all areas of hospice and palliative care. Delving directly into operations, staff interaction and performance, we coach your team in numerous scenarios for best practices, empowering your providers and staff to achieve their goals, innovate with out-of-the-box thinking and challenge conventional methods to improve company cultures.
Our Success Stories
Granite GRC advised and represented several large, international private equity firms in their successful investments of hospice providers, including a $580M acquisition of a large, multi-state mid-western hospice company.
Granite GRC represented a large national hospice provider in its $250M acquisition of the then largest hospital-at-home and skilled nursing-at-home provider in the country.
Granite GRC provides ongoing revenue cycle and compliance advice and support to a large mid-Atlantic hospice provider, including matters related to palliative care and under the No-Surprises Act.
Meet the Hospice and Palliative Care Team Lead
Linda Martien, CPC, COC, CPC-I, CPMA, CRC, AAPC Fellow
Director, Home Health and Hospice Services
Author, speaker and Director Home Health and Hospice Services Linda Martien’s broad expertise in reimbursement and revenue cycle management spans a wide variety of methodologies and practices in areas including home health, hospice, behavioral health, critical access hospitals, and more. She holds an excellent track record for helping clients navigate complex healthcare systems like Medicare, Medicaid, the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA), the Indian Health Service (IHS), and commercial health insurance. Linda brings in-depth knowledge and well-rounded perspectives to clients through her wide experience in both clinical and business settings. Her agility with claims, receivables, documentation and coding comes from years of working in and managing growing healthcare businesses. Linda also takes pride in offering clients superior written and verbal communication skills, a strong and self-directed work ethic, and a steadfast commitment to best practices.
