Arkansas hospice agencies are expecting to care for more patients this year as baby boomers age and more people choose end-of-life treatment.
Hospice use in Arkansas has been trending up since 2024. That year, 21,205 Medicare beneficiaries used hospice services in Arkansas, up 12.6% from the previous year, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Hospice executives also said they will carry on with educating people that hospice services can be provided as soon as patients receive the news that they have six months or less to live.
“Everybody thinks that hospice is where you go in the last three or four days of your life,” said Ron Peterson, president of Baxter Health of Mountain Home.
Baxter Health is affiliated with Hospice of the Ozarks, and Peterson said the hospice affiliate is poised for growth coming out of a public dispute at the end of 2025.
In an unusual move, several of the hospice organization’s former board members sought to separate from Baxter Health. The dispute played out in a lawsuit filed in Baxter County Circuit Court last year. The former board members said in the suit that the companies’ missions and futures weren’t aligned. The hospice board members who filed the lawsuit, however, recently dismissed it and left the organization.
Peterson told Arkansas Business last week the two nonprofits will continue to work closely together.
Other hospice agencies also expect to see growth.
Since he became president and CEO of LifeTouch Health of North Little Rock in March, Dr. Brian Bell said, the state’s largest nonprofit provider of hospice services has seen revenue growth of about 7%. And he projects LifeTouch will experience annual growth of 5% to 10% over the next few years.
LifeTouch was known as Arkansas Hospice Inc. before it changed its name on Oct. 1. It bounced back from “some difficult years” as a result of COVID, Bell said. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2023, Arkansas Hospice reported a loss of $1.8 million on revenue of $36.2 million. In the following year, it reported an income of $4.5 million on $46.9 million of revenue. For its fiscal year that ended in September, LifeTouch Health Hospice had about $50 million in revenue and about $5 million in net income, Bell said.
Reflecting an Evolution
Bell said Arkansas Hospice decided to change its name after more than 30 years to reflect its expanded services. “We really evolved past just hospice,” he said. Not to mention, he said, that the word “hospice” carries something of a stigma.
LifeTouch’s portfolio of services includes care to people in their homes and primary care for seniors where they live.
It also offers palliative care, which is support for those suffering from a serious or chronic illness but who have longer than six months to live.
“And I love having a name that really visually invokes what we do, which is to touch people’s lives every day,” Bell said.
He said the company’s growth strategy includes expanding the non-hospice service lines. “We want to triple that in the next couple years on revenue,” he said.
To increase revenue for the other services, LifeTouch will focus on “getting better at collecting the revenue and … being much more efficient … on billing and coding.”
LifeTouch also recently expanded its personal care services from the Little Rock area to Conway, Searcy and Hot Springs.
By treating patients before they enter hospice, LifeTouch will know the plan for the patient’s end-of-life care when they seek hospice services.
“We’re following that patient along the way at each location,” Bell said. “So it makes it really, really nice that the patient sees a friendly face, knows this program that they’ve been with for years, and they’re not being abandoned.”
‘Compassionate Care’
Anthony Reed, interim director of Hospice of the Ozarks, plans to expand the organization’s Care Coaching Program. That program is similar to palliative care and serves about 200 patients, Reed said.
He said Hospice of the Ozarks will add positions to the care program and spread the word about its benefits. “We’re providing assistance to patients with chronic illnesses, trying to get them what they need, whether it’s arranging transportation to appointments or helping get medical supplies that they need” to help keep them out of the hospital for treatment, he said.
And once those patients are in the Care Coaching Program, they can be identified earlier for hospice care, when they qualify for it.
“We really want to try to educate people that they shouldn’t be afraid of the word ‘hospice’ and that they get that true end-of-life, compassionate care,” Peterson said. “And the earlier that they look into that, the better. And I think that’s what hospice really focuses on, is the quality of life that you have, instead of just trying to extend the life by itself,” he said.
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