VITAS Advantage: Supporting Physicians With Patients Requiring Complex Modalities
How VITAS Helps You
Patients who require complex modalities that are difficult to deliver outside of a hospital, long-term care or skilled nursing facility can benefit from VITAS’ hospice expertise and resources, including complex interventions and therapies.
VITAS is equipped to take on patients who require complex modalities to treat their aggressive symptoms—patients for whom other hospice programs may lack resources or expertise to provide the necessary care, and who are typically not considered suitable for a transition to home care.
Led by our full-time medical directors, our physicians tailor care plans to patients’ wishes and goals near the end of life, producing more favorable outcomes for patients, families and caregivers, and fewer trips to the hospital or ED. VITAS partners with you and your practice to provide insight into our interventions and deliver the highest quality of symptom management.
Case Study: Patient with Advanced Lung Cancer
Care Coordination With Attending Physician
When you refer to VITAS, you can trust our interdisciplinary hospice teams to initiate the complex modalities that your patient requires to manage symptoms and achieve comfort in their preferred setting of care. We’ll work with you, the patient, their family and caregiver on a care plan that puts the patient and family first while benefitting everyone involved.
Aggressive Symptom Management and Open Formulary
Bolstered by our open formulary and proprietary home medical equipment division, VITAS has the medications, tools and expertise to support any patient. No matter how complex or challenging your patient’s symptoms, VITAS offers hospice and palliative care solutions and protocols that many other hospice providers do not, including but not limited to:
- Intravenous therapies for pain management, hydration, antibiotics, etc.
- Paracentesis and thoracentesis
- Chest tube/PleurX
- High-flow oxygen therapy
- Palliative blood transfusions
- BiPAP, CPAP and Trilogy non-invasive ventilation
- PEG-tube care and tube feedings
If symptoms worsen while your patient is under hospice care, VITAS adjusts the patient’s level of care to provide full-time clinical support, additional palliative measures and/or a temporary stay in a VITAS inpatient hospice unit until symptoms are stabilized and pain is managed.
