The HEART Behind HART
Meet Kat Dietrich DO, a hospice medical director who has been working in hospice and palliative care since 2011. Her business partner, Chris, is an internal medicine physician at a teaching hospital in Montana. At least once a week, Chris would call and ask Kat about whether a patient could be hospice appropriate. It’s not that he couldn’t google the criteria, or didn’t have half a dozen criteria booklets from various hospices in his desk, but rather nothing was easily accessible from his phone on rounds.
And so HART was born…
Kat is dual board certified, both as a hospice medical director as well as an internal medicine physician. She’s worked as a hospice medical director since 2011, and has also worked as an outpatient primary care physician as well as an inpatient palliative care physician.
She has seen the entire hospice spectrum, and believes so many patients who are eligible and appropriate for hospice don’t get referred, or they get referred too late. She understands that most referring providers don’t know the hospice criteria, or tend to try and only refer people who absolutely meet all the criteria under a certain diagnosis.
The purpose of HART is to get more patients access to their hospice benefit. We want patients to be referred earlier, allowing them to have the support and care they need at the end of their life. With easier access to the criteria, physicians, APP’s, nurses, case managers and all other sources of referrals will refer patients more often and identify eligible patients earlier in their disease process.
