Literature Review

Partnership in practice: How Tanzanian and United States leaders are advancing palliative careeHospice; 10/15/26A two-decade partnership between Global Partners in Care (GPIC) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT) shows how sustained, reciprocal learning can expand access to palliative care and inspire new models of community-based support in both Tanzania and the United States. GPIC (formerly the Foundation of Hospices in Sub-Saharan Africa – FHSSA) and ELCT have worked together to advance palliative care in Tanzania and the United States. In Tanzania, the partnership has expanded services for orphans and vulnerable children, those with life-threatening illnesses, and populations affected by HIV/AIDS. In the United States, lessons from Tanzanian partners have strengthened community-based approaches to palliative care.

HopeWest Gala raises funds for Delta County families experiencing aging, serious illness, and griefDelta County Independent [CO]; by HopeWest; 10/13/26This year’s HopeWest Gala, themed “A Night of Romantic Renaissance,” transformed the Bill Heddles Recreation Center on Sept. 19 into a world of fiery dragons and faraway castles. The sold-out event raised more than $77,000 to support HopeWest programs and services throughout Delta County. 323 guests gathered in support of the HopeWest mission to profoundly change the way the community experiences aging, serious illness and grief, one family at a time.

At life’s end, needs change and hospice responds knowinglyUW Medicine [WA]; by Colleen Steelquist; 10/14/26Q&A: A hospice nurse explains how end-of-life care can help patients and families trade intervention for comfort and connection. Fifty years ago, most Americans with terminal illnesses died in hospitals, often receiving hard-hitting treatments that they might have avoided had they truly understood their prognosis. Today, that portion is under a third. The rise of hospice care, which Medicare began covering in the early 1980s, is largely responsible for this sea change. Centered explicitly on pain control and quality of life, hospice offers patients and families permission to stop aggressive interventions, to focus on comfort over cure, and sometimes to be at home... [Amrit Singh, a hospice nurse care coordinator at Harborview Medical Center] explained the benefits of hospice care in a Q&A...

When clinical AI becomes a safety issue, cybersecurity stops being optionalNetcrook / Industrial Cybersecurity & Critical Infrastructure; by Netaegis; 10/14/26[Health Sector Coordinating Council’s Cybersecurity's] HSCC’s new AI clinical resilience playbook reflects a hard truth in healthcare: if artificial intelligence touches care delivery, then patient safety, operational continuity, and cyber risk have to be managed together. Healthcare has spent years treating AI as an efficiency tool. The more clinical systems depend on it, the more the risk picture changes. A new playbook from [HSCC's] Working Group puts that shift into plain terms by framing AI resilience as a clinical and security problem at the same time. The practical takeaway is simple but important: in healthcare, AI is not just software. It can sit inside workflows that affect diagnosis, monitoring, documentation, scheduling, and care coordination. That means failures, unexpected behavior, or tampering can carry consequences that go beyond IT disruption.

The ache of watching someone slowly fade awayeHospice; by Riddhi Tomar; 10/9/26No one prepares you for the grief of gradual disappearance. For loving someone who is still here, and yet, in ways both visible and invisible, is already beginning to leave. For watching familiarity fade while your love remains exactly where it has always been. People who visit after a month or even weeks often say, “He was alright the last time I saw him. How did things change so quickly?” But the truth is, they didn’t change quickly. We watched every inch of the journey...

Wings of Hope joins NorthStar Care CommunityNorthStar Care Community press release; 10/15/26NorthStar Care Community is anchored by its founding members – Arbor Hospice, Centrica Care Navigators, Hospice of Michigan, and now includes the newly affiliated member Wings of Hope.

Takeaways from an evaluation of Google’s diagnostic chatbot, AMIESTAT by Mario Aguilar; 10/13/26The Lancet last week published the results of a Google Research study, funded by Alphabet, with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center exploring the feasibility and safety of Google's company’s experimental diagnostic chatbot. In the study, roughly 100 urgent care patients chatted with Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer, or AMIE, which created a list of possible diagnoses and management plans. The encounters with the chatbot were observed by a supervisor who could step in, and patients later saw a clinician.Publisher's note: While I found both the STAT and Lancet articles a bit technical, it's fascinating to begin reading about studies using AI for patient diagnosis purposes. The STAT article may require a subscription; The Lancet journal article referred to is: Conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence in ambulatory primary care: a prospective feasibility study; 10/26.

As organ supply expands, equity must be reimaginedJAMA Network; by Lisa B. VanWagner, John Bucuvalas, David S. Goldberg, Ali Zarrinpar; 10/12/26For decades, transplant has been defined by scarcity... That landscape is changing... Focusing on organ scarcity as the primary barrier to equitable transplant has obscured upstream inequities in referral, evaluation, and listing. Population-based analyses suggest that only a minority of patients dying with end-stage organ failure are evaluated for transplant. For example, the national waiting list for liver transplant is currently fewer than 9000 candidates, but this number represents only a small fraction of the estimated 70 000 to 75 000 annual deaths from cirrhosis in the US. Expanded supply may expose, rather than resolve, inequities that have long been obscured by scarcity.

Fun fact: people with their next mountain trip planned are a lot happier than those who don't.

SOS: Year 1 A 33 --Who are the hospices that were revoked in 2025?Substack; by Joan Teno; 10/12/26Medicare can take away a hospice’s right to bill, an action called revocation. In 2025 it revoked 209 hospices, most often for abusive billing or for ties to other providers that put Medicare at risk. Of the 173 that I could find in Medicare’s public quality data, nearly all were for-profit, about 9 in 10 were in California, and almost half had been certified for less than two years.I then asked a simple question: how many other hospices look like the ones that were revoked? ...

UnitedHealth reports $4.1B in profit, launches AI recommendations for Medicare Advantage plansBecker's Payer Issues; by Elizabeth Casolo; 10/13/26UnitedHealth Group reported $4.1 billion in profit for the third quarter of 2026, up 75% year over year, according to an Oct. 13 release... The company is also rolling out AI-powered plan recommendations for the upcoming Medicare Advantage annual enrollment period, CEO Stephen Hemsley said on the earnings call.

Former CMS employee: War on home care fraud yields 30 percent collateral damageMcKnights Home Care; by Liza Berger; 10/13/26The recent uptick in fraud audits, denials and revocations may seem unusual, but it is not particularly new. One former Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services employee said he has seen it before — in the late 1990s... [Michael McGowan, a former CMS Region IX OASIS automation coordinator] sees the current environment as the aftermath of Operation Restore Trust. While the federal government is claiming success in response to rampant fraud, McGowan believes it is just turning over the apple cart, bruising a lot of decent apples in the process. “There are gross amounts of provider fraud and there are gross amounts of collateral damage,” he said. “They do not have the ability to truly tell the difference. What they’ve done is gone after a bunch of small players. It looks really good to say, ‘Oh, we’ve just closed 500 agencies.’ Well, I know damn good and well you did not do it right. My CMS experience in the 20 years I’ve been doing this work shows me that there’s at least 30% collateral damage. That’s the norm. And they go crowing about their success while these people’s life work has been vaporized.”

I’ve mentored people for 20 years. I use these 4 steps to help them advanceEntrepreneur; by Jissan Cherian; 10/9/26The best mentors treat every conversation as a two-way exchange, asking questions that sharpen the other person’s thinking while staying open to having their own views challenged. A four-step process of building self-awareness, gathering feedback from five people, separating perception from reality and refining your defining stories creates growth for both mentor and mentee.