Home-Based Palliative Care Organizations Struggle to Survive and Thrive in a Competitive Market

New opportunities to expand home-based palliative care (HBPC) highlight the need for novel data that explores how HBPC providers currently navigate this nascent business.

To investigate how HBPC providers and their organizations sustain their operations in a rapidly evolving market.

This was an exploratory, qualitative study.

We conducted focus groups with staff of nine HBPC organizations that held provider contracts with a large California insurance provider.

A research team member experienced in qualitative methods conducted semi-structured focus group interviews with HBPC agency staff who were knowledgeable about their agency's patient recruitment and enrollment processes. Interview sessions of roughly an hour long were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. We used thematic analysis procedures to identify codes and themes.

We identified seven themes: market competition, market diversity, HBPC reimbursement, service standardization, hiring practices, marketing, strategic enrollment processes, and outcomes monitoring. The participants called for more standardization in their field. In discussing key business operations-hiring, marketing, patient enrollment, outcomes monitoring-they demonstrated inventiveness and willingness to innovate in order to succeed in a complex healthcare sector.

Our study expands on the literature by providing a glimpse of the challenges encountered by HBPC providers and their organizations and the myriad strategies they undertake to navigate a health-service area that lacks standardized practice and payment guidelines. Our findings suggest that HBPC agencies will continue to struggle in the absence of standardization in practice, payment, and quality oversight.