The Price of Compassion - Commercialized Hospices and the Mistreatment of Vulnerable Patients

Introduction - Commercialized Hospices

We have occasionally written about the rise of the commercialized hospice industry, and concerns that commercialized hospices may not be providing the compassionate care they promise.  As we have discussed before, the hospice movement began with small, non-profit, community based organizations meant to provide compassionate palliative care to the terminally ill.  However, in the US, the hospice movement has been co-opted by commercial hospices, often run by large corporations, which may put profit ahead of compassion.

Several long investigative articles have appeared this year that focus largely on the commercial part of the hospice movement:
Terminal neglect? - how some hospices decline to treat the dying, Washington Post, May 3, 2014, by Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating
How dying became a multibillion-dollar industry, Huffington Post, June 19, 2014, by Ben Hallman
Is that hospice safe? - infrequent inspections mean it may be impossible to know, Washington Post, June 26, 2014, by Peter Whoriskey.

As we have discussed before, the biggest risk of the rush to commercialize hospices is that it may lead to the enrollment of patients who are not terminally ill.  To try to achieve a dignified death in as much comfort as possible, the hospice movement emphasizes aggressive use of analgesics, including narcotics, and other psychoactive drugs.  Also, hospice patients cannot expect treatments meant to prolong life or cure acute problems, since in terminal patients these may cause unpleasant side effects and will not, by definition, work.  Therefore, a patient who is not terminal enrolled in hospice runs risks of being drugged into a stupor, and could be doomed were he or she to develop an acute illness for which treatment is available, like a bacterial pneumonia that might respond to antibiotics, because in hospice antibiotics are not given for acute infections.  Thus the whole hospice model depends on the ability of hospices to enroll only terminally ill patients.

This is difficult because prognosis is difficult to predict.  Beyond that, we discussed how commercial hospices may have financial incentives to enroll patients who are not terminally ill because they can make a lot of money from such patients.

The recent articles add more evidence that commercial hospices may enroll patients who are not terminal, and such patients may end up suffering or dying prematurely because of excess pain treatment or withholding of treatment of acute illness inherent in the hospice model.

A Long Anecdote Illustrating the Dangers of Commercialized Hospices

The Huffington Post article provided an extended anecdote about what happened to a patient enrolled in a commercial hospice despite the lack of an identified terminal condition. The patient was Mary Maples.

By the fall of 2011, her health was often poor. She ate a special diet to keep her diabetes in check and likely also suffered from COPD, a disease that often afflicts ex-smokers and makes it hard to breathe. Still, she retained her wit and sense of humor

She was hospitalized briefly for a urinary tract infection. Her family felt she needed rehabilitation, but apparently had run out of eligibility for Medicare payment for it. Then somehow the family was approached by marketers for Vitas Inc, a commercial hospice company owned by Chemed, also the parent company of Roto-Rooter.

Spry doesn’t recall exactly when she first spoke to a representative from Vitas, or how the company found out that her mother might be a candidate for hospice. But Vitas staff told HuffPost that the medical director of the Titusville rehabilitation center is also on the Vitas payroll, as a team leader.

Spry said a Vitas nurse persuaded her that hospice was the correct choice for her mother. The nurse touted the at-home care and help with other chores that had grown difficult, such as bathing her mother,

Note that what the Vitas nurse allegedly emphasized were ancillary benefits of hospice, not its key function.  The implication is that at a time of vulnerability, the Vitas marketing pitch was deceptive.

It is not clear that Ms Maples or anyone with the legal power to make decisions for her understood the implications of hospice, or consented for her enrollment.

Spry signed the admission forms, even though she did not have the legal right to do so. Dunn, Maples’ grandson, actually had power of attorney over her affairs.

'I didn’t know what I was getting us into,' Spry said.

Vitas said patients or patient representatives must sign a consent form that clearly spells out the hospice mission before they can be enrolled. Records provided to HuffPost from Maples' family, obtained from Vitas, did not include this consent form.

Also,

It’s also not clear that Maples consented to hospice treatment, at least initially. She did not sign the documents authorizing her enrollment 'due to weakness,' according to Vitas records. Yet that same day, according to other nursing notes provided by her family, she was strong enough to move about using a walker during a physical therapy session. 

Enrolling the patient without her consent, or consent from a person with legal authority over her, appears to be a serious ethical failure by Vitas. 

Hospice records did not show the patient had a terminal illness.

Maples did not have a terminal illness. Her diagnosis was 'debility, unspecified,' according to her records. This is a catch-all term for frail patients that Medicare’s regulator has said hospices are no longer allowed to use, because so many claims made under the diagnosis were later rejected or determined fraudulent. 

So the patient did not have a terminal illness and did not consent to hospital enrollment, and the hospital company apparently did not make it clear that hospice is only supposed to be for terminal patients.  Furthermore, later it turned out that the family thought Ms Maples would be a candidate for resuscitation, yet hospice care is specifically not supposed to include such aggressive attempts at life prolongation.  Again, this suggests a serious failure by hospice personnel to communicate clearly at best, and perhaps outright deception.

Maples’ records show she or her family repeatedly indicated that she was full code, meaning she wanted life-saving treatment.

Nonetheless, the patient was apparently treated with narcotics and anti-psychotics even though she did not have chronic pain.  This appears to be very bad medical practice, and potentially very dangerous.

Maples was elevated to continuous care even when she wasn’t experiencing any pain at all, her records show. By doing so, Vitas boosted its daily billing rate from the standard $146.20 a day to $853.30.

Documents shared with HuffPost show that in the Melbourne office, at least, managers were encouraged to increase continuous care counts. In the fourth quarter of 2009, for example, one of four 'management program goals' was for continuous care to average 17 patients a day. Managers said they received bonuses pegged to whether they met this and other patient count targets.

The most difficult part of Maples’ experience to evaluate concerns her medication. Her records show she was given morphine, along with Ativan, a type of sedative, and Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic drug.

All three medications are contained in the 'comfort pack' that hospices ship to a patient’s house on admission. They are typically used in the final weeks of the patient’s life, when he or she is near death. 

Ultimately, Ms Maples suffered an acute event that the hospice did not apparently treat adequately.  A relative talked to her on the telephone, and found,

Her speech was garbled and she wasn’t making any sense, he recalled.

He then called the head office of the local Vitas chapter in Melbourne, Florida, and asked that his grandmother be discharged — he wanted to quit Vitas. The receptionist said Maples’ doctor was out of town, and nothing could happen until he returned the next week, according to Dunn.

Later that day, Vitas transferred Maples from her home to its inpatient unit at Courtenay Springs Nursing Home on Merritt Island.

Maples’ records indicate she was moved for 'constipation' — often a side effect of the medications she was receiving — and 'nausea.'

Then,

An ambulance brought Maples to Cape Canaveral Hospital, where she was 'unresponsive and in respiratory failure' on arrival, according to records. She was diagnosed with septic shock — a severe blood infection that is often fatal, especially in elderly patients. 

This implied that hospice personnel failed to adequately manage a potentially fatal acute problem, septic shock, extremely poor medical practice.  However, it would make no sense to aggressively treat septic shock afflicting a patient who was terminal, but, as noted above, Ms Maples did not have a terminal condition.  Although Ms Maples survived that episode, she died weeks later.

So in this one detailed case, a patient who had chronic problems but was not terminally ill was enrolled in hospice, apparently without adequate consent, and after a marketing pitch that did not seem to explain that hospice is only for terminal care.  The patient received apparently very bad medical care, including the use of narcotics for no apparent reason, and an initially inadequate response to a severe acute medical problem, probably hastening her death.  This suggests that commercialized hospices over-selling their services to the wrong patients can hurt, and sometimes even kill patients.

Overly Aggressive and Deceptive Marketing

The Huffington Post and two Washington Post articles also contained other illustrations of these problems.  In the Huffington Post article was the general observation that

Every day, hospice marketers descend on doctor’s offices, rehab centers and hospitals. These workers have been known to rifle through patient logs at nursing stations, scramble to sign up what some in the industry call 'last gasp' patients — people with just hours left to live — and even scuffle with each other in hospital corridors over the right to sign up dying people, according to current and former hospice employees and allegations made in federal lawsuits.

Such a frenzy suggests a certain lack of care about whether the targeted patients are appropriate. Furthermore, the article included specific examples of the push to enroll more patients, no matter what.  

'The pressure was direct from operations on a daily basis,' said James Robbins, a former sales manager at AseraCare Hospice, a chain operating in 19 states. 'What are you not doing? Why are we not getting more patients? We’d have constant conference calls, meetings.'

Robbins, who lives in Atlanta, said he would 'cruise' nursing home lobbies and try to pressure medical directors at those facilities to refer directly to him. 'It's not even about patient care anymore; they’ve gone to the dark side,' he said. 'It’s all about money.'

'I’m a nurse, not a saleswoman,' said Pamela Schiffman, a hospice nurse and patient case manager in California who said she has quit four jobs in the last decade because she was ordered to keep pestering families who resisted her pitch.

Note that AseraCare is a commercial hospice system owned by Golden Living, which in turn is a privately held corporation partially owned and entirely managed by Fillmore Partners, and San Francisco based private equity group (look here). 

Also, there is evidence that marketers were pushed by management to obscure the nature of hospice, and deceive patients into thinking that they would not be denied acute care should they need it.

'One huge problem I had to deal with on a daily basis is patients not understanding they were dying and truly on a real hospice,' said a former manager at a Vitas branch in Florida, who requested anonymity for fear of losing her current job in the industry. 'The admission and marketing staff would tell them, 'This is the new hospice, we are not for dying people, the rules have changed, we can just help you.'

Note that the idea that the rules have changed and hospice is not for dying people anymore is absolute nonsense. 

Furthermore, there is evidence that once enrolled, hospices may resist discharging patients even if it becomes apparent that they are not terminally ill.

A nurse who currently works for Vitas in the same Melbourne, Florida-based location that enrolled Maples said that nurses who tried to suggest at meetings that a patient was no longer appropriate for hospice were routinely 'humiliated.'

Medical Mismanagement

In the Huffington Post article, there were several anecdotes about excess use of pain medicine,

In one example described in court filings, prosecutors allege a Vitas patient was given crushed morphine, even though she wasn’t in pain. The morphine treatment continued even after the patient showed signs of having a toxic reaction to it — even seizures, prosecutors claim. 

Also,

Mary Gubacz fell into a ditch across the street from her assisted living facility at 2 a.m. after she was prescribed the powerful antipsychotic Seroquel while under care of Odyssey Hospice in Michigan, her daughter Marilyn Little said. 

Note that Odyssey hospices are one of multiple chains of hospices owned by Gentiva.


The Washington Post article, Terminal Neglect, provided data about many hospices' inability to manage worsening symptoms (but presumably mainly for patients who were terminally ill.)  In particular, it showed that many hospices never provide what is called continuous nursing care which is usually required by patients with worsening symptoms.  For example,

One of the largest such hospices in the country is the Heartland Hospice Services in Santa Rosa, Calif., a facility owned by HCR ManorCare, a company that was turned private in 2007 by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.

Its hospice in Santa Rosa billed Medicare in 2012 for more than 50,000 days of routine hospice care, but no patient received continuous care or general inpatient care, according to the Medicare billing records.

A spokesman for HCR ManorCare portrayed the absence of those services as a statistical anomaly.

Note that given the size of the sample, that would have to be a pretty major statistical anomaly.  

Also,

Other records, too, indicate that many hospices offer very little nursing care in the last days of life.

For example, Medicare tracks how often a hospice sends a skilled nurse to a patient in the 48 hours preceding death.  

But at about 12 percent of hospices, more than one-third of patients die without seeing a skilled nurse in the last 48 hours of their life. Indeed, at 34 hospices, no patient saw a skilled nurse during that time.

The newer Washington Post article, Is That Hospice Safe?, documented many instances of apparently inadequate care of worsening clinical problems,

A woman dying of liver cancer, battling nausea and breathing difficulties, waited weeks for someone to drain fluid from her swelling abdomen and died still waiting, according to records. Another cancer patient had a feeding tube that oozed pus where it pierced his skin and did not actually reach his stomach. He had received no fluids from it for five days, emergency room doctors said. At the same time, a patient complaining about chest pain waited two days for a recorded visit and eventually was taken to a emergency room and diagnosed with pleurisy.

Many of these problems may go unnoticed, because the article noted that hospices are inspected very infrequently, if ever, by government agencies.

Summary

The three recent articles add to the evidence that commercial hospices often enroll patients who are not terminally ill, although hospice is meant only for the terminally ill.  There may be strong incentives for hospice employees to do so, and such enrollment may be induced by deceptive marketing and not accompanied by true informed consent.  Once in hospice, many patients may get poor medical management.  Patients who are not terminally ill may be at risk of getting inadequate care, and perhaps dying due to this lack, were they to get acutely ill, since hospice is not meant to provide life prolonging or potentially curative care for acute problems.

Note that most of the examples above concern the largest commercialized hospices, owned by large publicly held corporations (Vitas owned by Chemmed and, Odyssey owned by Gentiva), or by large corporations owned by private equity (AseraCare, owned by Golden Living, run by Fillmore Partners, and HCR ManorCare, owned by Carlyle Group).  Such large and rich organizations ought to be particularly held accountable for what they are doing to vulnerable patients. 

The US is in the midst of a great, uncontrolled experiment.  We have systematically taken medical and health care services previously lead by health care professionals and sited within community non-profit organizations and given them to for-profit firms, often huge corporations.  Meanwhile, rather than increasing regulation to account for this, we have systematically deregulated health care organizations.  There is more evidence that an increasingly commercial health care system within the framework of wild West, laissez faire capitalism is expensive and dangerous.  It is particularly dangerous for vulnerable populations especially when they are unaware that their caregivers must answer to huge corporations.

In my humble opinion, we should return control of direct patient care, especially of the most vulnerable patients, to health care professionals and if necessary small non-profit community organizations.  We ought to give strong consideration to banning corporate hospices, and banning all forms of the corporate practice of medicine and corporate health care "delivery."

Given how many insiders make so much money from the current version of laissez faire capitalism in health care, however, I would expect strong resistance should such apparently "radical," but actually conservative proposals actually get any mainstream attention.