Our Mission
Open Access
IDT Teams (Patient care teams)
Our Leadership

"As a full Open Access hospice, Continuum Hospice Care taps the potential of hospice to provide specialist-level palliative care to the thousands of New Yorkers in need each year by integrating hospice end-of-life care with conventional medical care." In Open Access hospice, eligibility for hospice services is determined solely by the regulatory requirements: appropriate prognosis certified by a licensed physician and election of the benefit by patient or proxy. The patient's Plan of Care may include any potential treatment, including life-prolonging treatments, and as long as the patient remains eligible, he or she will receive hospice care.

Open Access dovetails hospice care with patients' other treatments, allowing best practice end-of-life care for a much longer period of time. The addition of hospice services is associated with a high level of patient and family satisfaction, and adding the costs of hospice care to the costs of disease-modifying treatments is generally counterbalanced by bringing a greater number of people into the program for a longer period of time.

Recently, Open Access has become the ideal for hospice programs in the United States; however, it has proven challenging to implement across the industry. The concern lies within the costs associated with treating patients who are receiving advanced disease-modifying or symptomatic treatments, such as invasive procedures, chemotherapy or certain expensive medications. These people are traditionally considered inappropriate for hospice and are usually rejected by hospices out of fear that such complex cases will consume too many resources, yet at Continuum Hospice Care, we believe that patients can greatly benefit from and should receive simultaneous hospice care and prescribed disease-modifying therapies that relieve pain and increase the patient's comfort and well-being.