PROVIDENCE – Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island, Visiting Nurse Home Care and Anchor Medical Associates have signed an agreement whereby HHCRI and VNHC have become Anchor’s preferred providers for home care, palliative and hospice services.
“There is great value in streamlining referrals and having just one agency to work with for our patients in need of home care, palliative and hospice services,” said Dr. Nathan B. Beraha, Anchor’s medical director and CEO, in a statement. “We are pleased to have Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island and Visiting Nurse Home Care jointly fill this role and confident that they will provide the best possible care for our patients.”
Anchor Medical Associates is a private medical group practice comprised of primary care internists and pediatricians along with certified physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurse care managers and registered nurses working together to provide patient-centered medical care. Anchor’s three practices are located in Lincoln, Providence and Warwick, through which it serves 35,000 patients.
This is not the first such agreement between HHCRI and a medical organization. Last year, the state’s largest hospice provider and Coastal Medical signed a similar agreement making HHCRI Coastal’s preferred hospice provider.
That agreement has yielded good results, according to Catherine Burke, spokeswoman for HHCRI, which together with VNHC comprise Home Care & Hospice of New England.
“I know that there have been cases where patients were seen by our physicians and care coordinators who worked closely with Coastal,” Burke said, “and they were referred to services that they might not otherwise have known about.”
Burke said that communication is crucial during transitions to home, palliative and hospice care.
“Whenever physicians communicate with each other it always benefits the patient,” Burke said, “because they’re sharing information about the patient’s situation.”
Burke added that such communication was the central reason for the new agreement with Anchor.
“In this case, the Anchor physicians will confer with the HHCRI nurses and physicians to foster communications so that the patient’s medical situation and all of the information is available to both sides,” Burke said. “That ultimately benefits the patient.”
