Essential Role of Hospice Highlighted in Guest Commentary

WASHINGTON—Tom Koutsoumpas, founder and CEO of The National Partnership for Healthcare and Hospice Innovation (NPHI)—which represents more than 120 nonprofit hospice and palliative care providers serving 20% of the nation’s hospice patients—has authored a guest commentary piece in U.S. News titled, “Everyone Deserves a Dignified Death. But Hospice Care Is Under Threat.” 

Koutsoumpas also serves as the president of Healthsperien, LLC, a Washington-based health care consulting firm. In his commentary, he emphasizes the essential role hospice has played since the Medicare hospice benefit established it as a permanent part of the health care system in 1983.

The commentary aims to underscore the critical role of nonprofit, community-based hospices in the health care system.

“No one should face their final moments of dying alone, under harsh lights without compassionate care like they did several decades ago,” Koutsoumpas said. “A strong hospice community is needed today more than ever to guard the very patient-centered values that sparked the hospice movement and to ensure that patients at the end of their lives are surrounded by family, friends and the familiar sounds of home.

“Studies show that nonprofit hospices provide more training and more comprehensive and better quality care services than for-profit entities,” Koutsoumpas continued. “Yet for-profit enterprises have largely taken over the market. [For-profit providers] have been associated with lower quality care and family satisfaction, fueling disparities and fragmented care at a time when coordinated, high-quality support is most needed.”

Koutsoumpas concluded the piece by emphasizing the need to strengthen community-based nonprofit hospices to advance quality and ensure that “end-of-life care remains grounded in the values that sparked the hospice movement decades ago.”

Click here to read the full guest commentary piece in U.S. News.