Concordance Healthcare Solutions has a long history of partnering with healthcare providers looking after patients suffering from long-term acute and chronic illnesses. The company's Extended Care Division provides support services to organizations offering home care, long-term care and hospice care.
It’s well known that apart from medical care, patients and their families benefit significantly when they receive counseling and psychological support provided by palliative care teams. Concordance's innovative supply and support solutions mean that palliative care teams can spend more time caring for patients and less time on unproductive tasks.
Palliative Care
The origins of palliative care can be traced back to the 1950s where it was realized that care for a dying person was enhanced through the combined input of an interdisciplinary team. The term palliative care was developed to overcome negative connotations of the French word hospice. Initially, hospice and palliative care encompassed the needs of people suffering from chronic, long-term and terminal illnesses, which is still the case internationally. However, with Medicare providing hospice care reimbursement for persons who have less than six months to live there is now a distinction between palliative care, for patients who may or may not be at the end-of-life, and hospice, for which it is required.
Requirements for Palliative Care Teams
There are many similarities between palliative and hospice care. Both programs seek to provide for the complete needs of patients and their families by:
- Providing medicines that alleviate pain and symptoms
- Delivering support that allows patients to lead nearly normal lives
- Counseling patients and their families to improve their ability to live with and accept their conditions
A multi-disciplinary palliative care team will include:
- Doctors
- Nurses
- Social workers
- Therapists
- Pharmacists
- Counselors
Palliative care may be based within hospitals, community health centers or homes, and service requirements to support palliative care teams have many parallels to those of hospice care teams. In fact, this has been recognized through the formation of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
Supporting Palliative Care Teams
Concordance Healthcare Solutions is one of the largest distributors of healthcare products in the country. Our personalized care solutions cover the needs of palliative and hospice care, home care and long-term care service providers in the following ways:
- SONO: Concordance is a founding member of SONO, which brings together the best-in-class hospice service providers to offer outstanding service through a single point of contact.
- Flexible ordering solutions: Our web-based uCommand® ordering solution provides for direct mobile ordering of formulary items from multiple vendors.
- Patient direct delivery: We deliver supplies directly to community health centers, hospices and to patients’ homes, with same-day shipping when required.
- System interface: Our systems are designed to interface with billing systems.
- Benchmarking: Inventory control and management systems allow organizations to benchmark performance and track patient-per-day costs.
- Third Party Medicare Billing: To relieve stress from Palliative Care patients, Concordance provides medical supply products while also handling the Medicare billing for the patient.
Concordance's goal is to deliver a service that's beyond your expectations. As a leading medical and equipment supply company, we are able to meet your entire medical supply needs, and through our relationship with SONO, a convenient, effective and efficient one-stop service.
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