Palliative care executive, speaker, and innovator transforming serious illness care. Passionate about leadership, telehealth, and pain management. Advocate for better healthcare delivery and teamwork.
Stop Telling Me the Answer. Show Me How You Got There. "The best CTIs don't simply state that a patient is hospice eligible—they demonstrate why." Another quote from beloved and well-respected Hospice Physicians- "think of your CTI as your love letter to CMS.
"Will this help my pain?" It's one of the most common questions I hear from patients and families. Usually, the question isn't really about acupuncture. It's about hope. People living with serious illness are often carrying much more than physical symptoms. There
March is Kidney Awareness Month, a time often focused on prevention, early detection, and life-sustaining treatments like dialysis. These conversations are important—and incomplete. Missing too often is space for an equally valid, deeply human decision: the decision to stop dialysis. For many people living with advanced kidney disease,
For patients, caregivers, and clinicians walking the palliative and hospice journey In palliative care and hospice, we are often surrounded by urgency—symptoms to manage, decisions to make, emotions to hold, lives to honor. And yet, amid all of this motion, one of the most therapeutic interventions available to us
The holidays arrive every year whether we feel ready or not. They come with lights and music, rituals and expectations—tables set the way they’ve always been set, recipes made the way they’ve always been made. And yet, for many, something essential is missing. A chair is empty.
In palliative care, we have a front-row seat to love in action. We watch adult children pour themselves into caregiving for aging parents—managing appointments, medications, decisions, grief. But increasingly, those same caregivers are also raising children or supporting young adults at the very same time. They are “the
Every October, we do something bizarre. We cover our houses in skeletons, ghosts, and gravestones. We dress up as zombies. We tell creepy stories. We watch movies about death… for fun. And yet, bring up real death at the dinner table and suddenly everyone needs to “go check the laundry.
In Buddhism, there is a powerful teaching story often referred to as “the bird on your shoulder.” A monk asks his students, “If a bird sat on your shoulder and whispered, ‘Today could be the day you die,’ how would you live?” The question is not meant to frighten—but
We spend much of our lives preparing for beginnings — birth, school, jobs, marriages — yet most of us arrive at life’s end with little understanding of what the process of dying actually looks like. For families, it can feel like a storm without a map. For clinicians, especially those outside
In a world driven by data, deadlines, and diagnostics, humanism in medicine can sometimes feel like a quiet whisper in a crowded room. Yet, in hospice and palliative care, humanism is not just present—it’s the pulse. At its core, humanism in palliative care is the unwavering belief that
In cardiology, national guidelines already recommend that every patient receiving a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) also receive a palliative care consult. The rationale is both evidence-based and deeply humane: when a person is about to commit to a complex, life-prolonging technology, they deserve the dignity of informed,
In hospice and palliative care, our shared goal is to ease suffering, uphold dignity, and support patients and families through some of life’s most tender moments. Yet how we define comfort, dignity, and support is deeply shaped by culture, beliefs, and identity. Delivering high-quality, person-centered care means