ChristianaCare to outsource palliative care to AccentCare
- ChristianaCare is discontinuing its in-house palliative care services.
- Its hospice partner AccentCare will take over palliative care.
- The transition is expected this winter, Chief Physician Executive Kert Anzilotti said.
- ChristianaCare and an AccentCare company formed a hospice joint venture in 2021.
DELAWARE, UNITED STATES — ChristianaCare is discontinuing its in-house palliative care services and handing them to AccentCare, the company that already provides its hospice care.
The transition is expected this winter, and the health system will communicate directly with patients about any changes to their care.
Deepening a hospice partnership
“We want to be clear that ChristianaCare is not stepping away from palliative care,” Kert Anzilotti, the system’s chief physician executive, said in a statement to Delaware Online/The News Journal, which reported the change on Oct. 23.
“The delivery model is changing, but palliative care will continue to be an important part of our approach to high-quality, patient-centered care,” he said.
AccentCare, a post-acute and in-home health care company, has a long-standing partnership with ChristianaCare to provide hospice services. Anzilotti said the system will “deepen that partnership” by having AccentCare also take over palliative care.
The health system has encouraged its palliative care clinicians to consider other opportunities within ChristianaCare or with AccentCare, Anzilotti said.
ChristianaCare did not provide details about how the services would be outsourced or what the change would mean for patients, the newspaper reported.
A joint venture since 2021
The two organizations formed a joint venture in July 2021 to expand in-home hospice and palliative care across Delaware. Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care of Delaware, an AccentCare company, was to manage daily patient care.
Founder warns on integration
John Goodill, the retired physician who founded ChristianaCare’s palliative care services, told the newspaper the move is a “terrible idea” that will cause patients to suffer and quality of care to decline.
In a letter to ChristianaCare CEO Jennifer Schwartz, Goodill said seriously ill patients who use this care are often still pursuing other treatment through ChristianaCare, so it helps to have palliative clinicians within the health system.
“Recreating this level of integration through an external organization will be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible,” he wrote.
The case for the move
Anzilotti said partnering with AccentCare, whose focus and expertise are centered on this work, will let ChristianaCare support more patients and expand access to this care.
What it means for health systems
ChristianaCare is moving a clinical service to a partner it already works with on hospice. The dispute turns on whether palliative care can stay coordinated with treatment that continues inside the system.
Health systems weighing healthcare outsourcing for clinical services can ask how a partner will keep its clinicians connected to their own care teams. OA’s top healthcare outsourcing companies in the United States list is a starting point for comparing outsourcing partners.
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