Largest NY nonprofit hospice business is formed

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New York - Continuum Health Partners is exiting the hospice business. Metropolitan Jewish Health System is taking over all of Continuum's hospice and palliative care services, including its contracts with more than two dozen nursing homes and other facilities, and the 18-bed inpatient hospice and palliative care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

MJHS said the deal creates the largest nonprofit hospice and palliative care program in the state. MJHS had operated 12 hospice beds and served some 500 patients in New York City and Long Island. Today's deal boosts its caseload by 50% to about 750 patients.

The agreement, which took a year and half to craft, expands MJHS's reach and could help it develop more innovative and less costly models of care. MJHS has already hired three additional physicians, and has plans to recruit at least 50 additional staff members in the coming year and eventually add two new facilities in Manhattan Beach and the Bronx.

The system “will be able to provide a larger breadth of services and be able to visit patients more frequently,” said Barbara Hiney, executive vice president of the new organization.

At Beth Israel, MJHS will lease the hospital's Jacob Perlow in-patient hospice unit and purchase its 18 beds. Dr. Russell Portenoy, Beth Israel's chair of pain and palliative care, said he hopes to promote more use of hospice and greater continuity of care at the end of life. Today, New York State has one of the lowest utilization rates of hospice care in the country.

“[The idea is to build] a pioneering, innovative program that can create upstream palliative care that is home-based and interdisciplinary and linked with an institutional component,” said Dr. Portenoy.

With MJHS in charge of the hospice program, Continuum will focus on its main mission of providing outpatient and tertiary care. “We felt [MJHS] could provide resources to the hospice program that as a tertiary care provider we would be unable to,” said a Continuum spokesman.

MHJS will hire Continuum's 130 hospice employees. Dr. Portenoy will remain in his current position and also become chief medical officer of the combined operation, overseeing care at more than 40 facilities. MHJS also will offer Continuum patients other services, such as elder care and long-term care.

Crain's NY

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