Extending the range of home tele-services that can be brought to today's patients.

January 2007
Home Telehospice… Making the Transition From Home Telehomecare

It’s been 2 years since home telehospice was featured on Home Telehealth Community of Care pages. The focus there was the need for providing increased communications and improved services to end of life patients and caregivers. Case after case noted improved access for patients and, of course, the challenges of doing so, particularly for minority populations.

What’s changed & what can we learn from experiences to date?
The best change is that the “idea” of telehospice—providing end of life care via telecommunications resources some of the time—doesn’t elicit a knee-jerk negative reaction about presumed “less” care. It may be that “high touch, no tech” care used to be the hallmark of hospice; today, however, with nursing shortages, needier patients, and a host of other challenges, we’re faced with the possibility of “no touch” for some of our patients. Probably for this very reason, telehospice is becoming more of interest than ever before. (Telehospice in black and white)

We need to reach a certain comfort level quickly, though. How? For one, let’s look at providers who are practicing home telehospice after using telehealthcare in home care service delivery. It’s true, they’re starting off with a head start: they are either transitioning their patients from home telehealthcare when the need for hospice is evident; or they are using fully trained staff already familiar with the tools of home telehealth (many being used without adaptation for hospice care). Value of this transition:

• Financial pluses: little or no training is required for this staff, thereby saving money in lost staff time and payment of trainers.
• Patient/Caregiver care pluses: those who transition to telehospice are already familiar with the tools as well, and sometimes the same providers join their hospice teams.

But all of this is just chat: see the Telehospice Cases from the Trenches segment for cases showing how and why telehospice has been used and, significantly, what has worked. Three telehospice providers share their experiences.

Tools of Telehospice—Just Like Being There, Some of the Time identifies tools that replicate conventional hospice visits—the aspiration of all professionals involved in using telehealthcare in the home.

Then the bug-a-boo: getting telehospice to work. It’s more than turning on a machine. See Patient-Ready Telehospice, to learn how to get the new focus on telehospice right, one patient at a time.

And, finally, for our much valued keynote Coming Home presentation, Dr. Andre' Lee presents his views of the growing importance of telehospice in providing hospice access for minority population in the piece, titled Telehospice and the African American Community. Just when we think we have a handle on access to telehealth by transitioning home telehealth patients to home telehospice, we see a gaping chasm: the complete non-participation in any form of telehealth by America’s multicultural populations.