Growing Interest in Hospice and Palliative Care Coordination Technologies

In hospice and palliative care, patients usually deal with a hospital team, a hospice provider, and relatives on the same week. Coordinating these parties has always been complicated. In the case of increasing interest to hospice and palliative care technology, it is mainly due to such difficulties rather than a wish to use new innovations for their own sake.

For hospice care, communication is essential. It means that medication change, changes in symptoms, and concerns of families can cause the need to respond quickly. Late information or isolated data locked in certain systems can cause redundant actions, misunderstandings, and added stress to patients and their relatives.

It causes the necessity to look for technology that would assist in improving communication and visibility on the part of teams providing palliative care. Patients' condition and needs should be transparent for all teams involved in care delivery.

Families also have new expectations. Now many patients' relatives expect to receive up-to-date information concerning their families' condition and hospice care activities. Therefore, hospices are expected to provide effective communication without any extra workload for their teams, which is caused by the creation of new documentation.

However, introducing technology in hospices can be difficult because many organizations operate with a budget and personnel shortage. Systems require training and adjustment of workflow, which leads to certain disruption at first.

Interoperability remains an issue, too. There are several systems that do not interact easily, and the data is often located in them. Therefore, if data exchange between the organizations is complicated, they will keep using phone contacts, paper documentation, or creating redundant documentation process, which would cause more delay.

Now healthcare buyers pay much attention to such aspects of technologies. The choice of technology is evaluated based on its actual outcomes. In other words, there is a necessity to implement technology that would fit into the clinical workflow and would reduce efforts spent on communication between different parties.

Thus, growing interest in digital coordination tools is based on the recognition that hospice and palliative care involve intensive communication. However, technology is not able to improve care delivery in this situation. Still, systems that help reducing information gap and facilitating decisions are crucial.