Palomar Health and Kara Health Partnership
Palomar Health has partnered with Kara Health to expand its continuum of care, further allowing patients to receive world-class healthcare in their own community and home through a new joint venture – Palomar Health Palliative & Hospice Care.
Palliative Care provides specialized medical care for people living with a serious illness, such as cancer or heart failure. Hospice Care focuses on the care, comfort, and quality of life of a person with a serious illness who is in the last six months of life.
Through this new partnership, Palomar Health Palliative & Hospice Care allows patients to stay within the Palomar Health family when dealing with serious illness. As a result, patients will benefit from more effective pain and symptom management through greater coordination and collaboration between patients’ clinical teams in all settings, from inpatient to outpatient to home.
“This joint venture shows Palomar Health’s commitment to providing dignified care through end of life to our communities,” Palomar Health Chief Operations Officer Sheila Brown said. “Palliative and hospice care will allow our family members to live or pass in comfort and care within the walls of their own home.”
With a growing need for palliative and hospice care in the region as a larger population reaches an older age, Palomar Health decided to partner with Kara Health based on Kara’s excellent track record providing similar services in other communities.
“We are very excited about this partnership with Palomar Health and the opportunity to positively impact so many patients who are dealing with serious illness,” says Kara Health founder & CEO, Devan Walia. “Palomar and Kara share a commitment to putting patients first and leveraging technology to improve the patient experience.”
Palliative Care
While medical advances have provided great benefit to some, many people with serious illnesses can still experience physical and emotional distress, as well as lack of alignment between their personal values and goals and the medical care they receive.
Multiple studies have shown that specialized palliative care services address these needs in a way that usual care does not. With a focus on defining and adhering to patients’ goals of care, managing pain and symptoms, addressing psychosocial and spiritual issues, and coordinating care among multiple providers and settings, palliative care improves the quality of life and experience of care for people with advanced illness. Research shows that people often live longer when they receive palliative care along with other treatments focused on treating their illness.
Palliative Care is an additional layer of support for patients with advanced illness. Palliative Care services include physical pain management, advance care planning, psychosocial support for patients, spiritual support, and a 24/7 on-call team for crisis intervention.
Hospice Care
Hospice Care seeks to alleviate physical pain and to provide psychosocial and emotional support. Our physician-led hospice team provides expert medical care aimed at minimizing physical pain with appropriate prescription medications, delivered to patients free of charge.
Our hospice teams include social workers, bereavement counselors, and chaplain/spiritual leaders who serve as valuable custodians of patient and family wishes. If we do our job well, patients remain comfortable in their home environment, maintain dignity, and do not feel like a burden on their loved ones, as our team provides valuable support to everyone close to the patient.
Learn more about our Executive Management Team.