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.

Under the sponsorship of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, the Hartford Foundation opened the Challenge to all health care organizations, settings, disciplines, and specialties across the United States.

Mr. Ayers explained the ‘Choices’ option as a path to maintain “high-quality outcomes without using acute care facilities, emergency room visits, and in-patient treatments.”

“We want to prove the value of this service to the market for health insurers,” he said.

Helios Care describes the program goals: stabilize symptoms through in-home intervention and care coordination, improve quality-of-care with patient-centered services that address social needs, reduce unnecessary emergency room visits and avoidable hospitalizations, and transition the person into appropriate longer-term programs.

The additional grant from The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation and the Tipping Point Challenge honor encourage Mr. Ayers in the new year. Despite stories of staffing shortages throughout the health care industry, he said Helios Care maintains a strong staff of dedicated professionals.

“We have very, very loyal employees,” he said. “In some cases, we have more applicants than spots available. The job design is appealing — our nurses are on the road with flexibility for their schedules rather than being assigned to a (hospital) unit floor for 12-hour shifts. They get a real reward out of working so directly with patients.”

“They’re driven by their mission,” he said.