SoutheastHEALTH’s hospice service has been named a 2017 Hospice Honors Elite recipient by Deyta Analytics, a division of HEALTHCAREfirst, the leading provider of Web-based home health and hospice software, outsourced billing and coding services and advanced analytics.

Hospice Honors is a highly regarded program that recognizes hospices providing the highest level of quality care as measured from the caregiver’s point of view. Southeast Hospice, established in 1986 as the region’s first hospital-based hospice, has offered a special kind of caring to thousands of families.

“Hospice Honors is a landmark compilation of hospices that provide the best patient and caregiver experiences,” said J. Kevin Porter of HEALTHCAREfirst. “I am extremely proud of Southeast Hospice for achieving this highest of honors and I congratulate them on their success.” He explained that award recipients were identified by evaluating hospices’ performance on a set of 24 quality indicator measures.

Of the 357 U.S. hospices earning honors status, only seven were recognized in Missouri. Southeast Hospice is the only hospice in Missouri to receive elite status. Elite status recognizes Southeast’s scoring above the Deyta Analytic Performance Score on 100 percent, or all 24, of the evaluated questions. 

SoutheastHEALTH Home Care Services Administrator Vickie Schnurbusch, MSN, RN, CHPN, said, “The Southeast Hospice team has always been dedicated to providing the highest quality of care possible, both for patients and their caregivers. The entire team is devoted to helping patients and families navigate through one of the most difficult times in life.”

She noted that Southeast Hospice averages serving 45 to 50 patients and families a month.

Southeast Hospice, she continued, “recognizes dying as a normal process and neither hastens nor postpones death. Instead, we help people with an incurable condition live as fully and comfortably as possible.”

Southeast Hospice serves patients in the home setting as well as in nursing homes in Cape, Bollinger, Scott, Perry and Stoddard counties and portions of New Madrid and Mississippi counties.  The service also has a partnership with Perry County Memorial Hospital that’s designed to enhance the quality of hospice services for terminally ill patients in the region.

About Southeast Hospice

Southeast Hospice is a not-for-profit agency that is Medicare certified, Medicaid approved, state certified and accredited by The Joint Commission. 

The staff includes a full-time medical director with over 16 years’ experience in pain and symptom management; an RN nursing staff with over 100 cumulative years of hospice experience; a dedicated medical social worker who provides bereavement services for 13 months after the loss of a loved one; and 24-hour access to pharmacy, wound and stoma care, diabetic and infusion care.