Ever started a hospice from scratch??

[RN4ustat, BSN, RN]

I am curious if any of you nurses have ever helped start a hospice from the ground up. If so, what exactly does that involve. I currently work for a VERY large, well-known hospice company but I was recently offered the position of Patient Care Coordinator with the responsibility of helping get this new hospice off the ground. I'm probably not going to accept the position but I was curious if any of you have any insight. Thanks in advance for your replies.

[hospicemom]

I was hired about 2 weeks ago by a local nursing home to asst with starting an in house hospice. we will be in-house now and start branching out to the community as soon as we can. I am not the administrator however I am the case manager so I work closely with the admin on getting this going. I think the hardest thing is following the regs and making sure we are doing things by the book. We have our temp license now...in order to get our perm license we have to have 5 full admission to death patients and then we get reevaluated for our perm license. IDT is a little challanging until we work out our glitches as well as getting the referrals from the docs. It is so exciting to be a part of this though. Its going to be huge!