Home Health & Hospice Week

With General Inpatient Care billing un-der continued scrutiny, more hospice facilities continue to open — and close.

In West Virginia: Hospice of the Panhandle in Kearneysville has opened a 14-room inpatient facility, reports The Journal newspaper in Martins-burg. The 19-acre property also includes an office building.

In Texas: Eighteen-state chain VITAS In-novative Hospice Care is in the midst of constructing a 14-bed hospice unit on the campus of Baylor Medical Center at Carrollton, reports the Dallas Business Journal. VITAS expects the unit to open in mid-2014.

In Missouri: Sedelia native and nurse Nor-ma Poindexter is raising funds to build Hospice House Shalom, which plans to break ground in May, reports the Sedelia Democrat newspaper. The nonprofit inpatient facility hopes to collaborate with the two hospice providers that serve the area, but that don’t have facilities, Poindexter says. Poindex-ter is using land she owns for the project.

Closure: Home Hospice of West Texas is closing its Hospice House in Odessa, reports the Odessa American newspaper. The provider is closing the only inpatient hospice serving the region due to a decline in patients that company representatives attribute to increasingly stringent Medicare reimbursement rules.

Home Hospice usually ran an annual deficit of about $200,000, but that ballooned to about $600,000 last year, according to the paper. Hospice House also accepted patients who could not pay, giving away about $1 million worth of care throughout its history.

“It is not a financial problem, it is really truly regulations, because the rules are preventing access for inpatient care,” the hospice’s Karen Car-ter told the American. To meet expenses, an average of five of the facility’s nine beds must be filled daily. Last year the average was closer to two patients daily, the newspaper reports. The closure is due to “Medicare rules being implemented under the Obama administration that have restricted access to care and caused many inpatient facilities to close around the country,” the hospice says.