Axxess Hospice now provides a palliative-specific workflow that eliminates unnecessary documentation and optimizes efficiency for palliative care.
While hospice care is managed through benefit periods of either 60 or 90 days, palliative care is managed through open-ended admission periods. An admission period begins when the patient is admitted to palliative care and ends when the patient is discharged. Because of this, palliative patient information in the system will reference an admission period, rather than a benefit period.
Orders for palliative care patients are written by a physician or nurse practitioner, and thus do not need to be signed by physicians. To prevent orders from being sent to physicians, users can now select Do Not Send on an order for palliative care. When selected, the order will still go to the QA Center for approval but will not be sent and tracked for a returned signature. Once the order is approved in the QA Center, the order status will update to Order Received.
When scheduling tasks for a palliative care patient, hospice assessments are not included in the task list. For hospice care patients, palliative notes are not included in the task list.
Since palliative care is not driven by ordered frequency, the Frequency tab and Frequency quick link have been removed. The Frequency order type has also been removed.
Diagnoses remain an important driving factor of care for palliative patients. However, since palliative patients have not elected hospice care, the Terminal flag will not appear with palliative patients’ diagnoses.
Since authorizations are not applicable to palliative patient care, the Authorizations tab will not be present for palliative patients.
For palliative care patients, medications do not need to be marked as “covered” or “not covered” by hospice. Therefore, this option has been removed for palliative patient medications.
Updated on 02/24/2021
