Palliative with home health

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Our hospital offers a Palliative care NP to go into the home and see a patient on palliative care, where some hospitals have a palliative care department and as a regular clinic appointment.

My questions is, does anyone else have an agency that offers this along with home health? I find that home health nurse and palliative NP are teaching the same things, and patients are getting overwhelmed and aggravated, plus it takes up a lot of time/scheduling. I would like to propose to my agency to wait 3-4 weeks before palliative comes in after home health gets established to re-evaluate the need for palliative care.

I can't find anywhere on CMS that shows the billing allowed for this, but it seems like double dipping to me.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
Our hospital offers a Palliative care NP to go into the home and see a patient on palliative care, where some hospitals have a palliative care department and as a regular clinic appointment.

My questions is, does anyone else have an agency that offers this along with home health? I find that home health nurse and palliative NP are teaching the same things, and patients are getting overwhelmed and aggravated, plus it takes up a lot of time/scheduling. I would like to propose to my agency to wait 3-4 weeks before palliative comes in after home health gets established to re-evaluate the need for palliative care.

I can't find anywhere on CMS that shows the billing allowed for this, but it seems like double dipping to me.

How is the Palliative NP coordinating care? Is there any communication between the Home Care RN and the Palliative NP?

In my view it seems like a pathway for collaboration in these cases would be beneficial for everyone.

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Specializes in Pediatrics Retired.

Your first paragraph is confusing in regard to if the patient is homebound; go to the home versus outpatient visit. Regardless, I could see a benefit if the NP was a provider for the PCP and could write scripts in that regard for the patient and if the NP would provide other nursing care according to the care plan and be considered and billed as a skilled nursing visit. But in addition to skilled nursing visits? I don't think so.

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Yes. We work with a local hospice that will send a palliative care NP to the home. We do have some overlap, but the palliative NP is able to prescribe changing meds as needed based on symptoms. I've found this ideal for patient's who really should be in hospice, but are resistant to going to hospice. If the homecare nurse and the NP communicate well it can really benefit the patient.

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