Helios wins national honors, program grant

Helios Care — formerly Catskill Area Hospice and Palliative Care —won a $200,000 year-end grant from The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation for its award-winning “Choices” program, designed to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits and address social needs for individuals with serious illness.

“The cost of the final year of life is the most expensive,” said Helios Care President and CEO Dan Ayers. “Any service that can show reduction of cost has a place in the future of health care. ‘Choices’ provides high-quality, lower-cost care, and in our pilot, we’re collecting good data. It’s an experiment that will let us prove we can provide the services people need and want.”

The December grant is the Cabrini Foundation’s second for ‘Choices,’ first seeding the program with a $300,000 contribution in 2020. Mr. Ayers said the new funding allows the program to serve more than 90 people through the end of 2022. The grant came just two weeks after Helios Care won national recognition for “innovative initiatives that have made — or will make — positive, breakthrough change in the care of serious illness.” The John A. Hartford Foundation Tipping Point Challenge awarded its Silver Winner honor to ‘Choices’ and named it one of the top eight entrants of all national applications.