Hey guys I agree VA hospitals can be dumps at times, more out of lack of direction of purpose. However, I am very interested in your thoughts about a program I am reviewing right now, for my business model.
My company is focused on home and hospital based care that leverages techology through telemedicine. recently have had the opportunity to enter into a collaborative business arrangement with a non for profit that is focused on healthcare services. The first area of services will be based on Hospice and Palliative care.
The first concept basically ensures a patients right to die on their own terms with dignity, and tries to ensure a quality of life that is pain free during the last 120 day or so of a patients life once they have entered into a terminal stage of care. For instance how would can you give the patient the services necessary to die in his own bed with his family, instead of hooked up multiple ICU machines and possibly getting hospital related infection that only increase the pain and suffering.
The second concept is for patients who have a terminal disease but are not dying as of yet. Palliative care is focused on maintaining a quality of life pain management, and symptom management not a cure. Basically making the patient as functional as possible with the understanding at the end of the day he or she will enter into hospice care. This type of patient would be your Heart failure patients, degenerative disease patients, liver disease patients all of whom have a quality of life left that is better undisturbed by often experimental long short curative treaments (CHEMOTHERAPY) that cause the patient not to have a quality of life.
this care is not for patients who have a reasonable expectation of cure but patients who are suffering through terminal illness or just plain old terminal old age problems that do not benifit from heroric measures.
The reason I ask about this the VA has been charged to provide this new class of care system wide. It is not at every VA, but the VA will be the lead healthcare orgnization providing this type of care nation wide. Your thoughts welcomed.
The main reasons for offering this care is two fold one the high cost of ICU admissions basically for the terminally ill to die, and as means of finding a quality of life for the terminally ill.
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