About Us
The goal of hospice care is to improve the quality of dying patients' last days by offering comfort and dignity, focusing on palliation and the relief of suffering, individual control and autonomy. Hospice was first introduced in the United States in the 1970s. The number of hospices has grown rapidly in the last twenty years. However, still less than 25% of the dying in the US access this service. Many elderly patients approach end of life in isolation. Rural hospice providers have identified several barriers to the provision of hospice services in their communities such as shortage of nurses, aides, and social workers, insufficient reimbursement and restrictive regulatory definitions of service areas based on mileage and driving time, rather than quality of care outcomes. Telehealth, defined as the use of telecommunications and information technology with the goal to bridge geographical gaps and enhance the care delivery process, is considered as one possible tool that can transcend barriers to quality end-of-life care.

The Telehospice Project Research Team is a long-standing interdisciplinary team of researchers committed to intervention research using telehealth technology. We aim to design and test interventions for hospice caregivers that can be delivered through telehealth technologies in an effort to overcome the geographic burden and isolation created through caring for a dying love one.

We are committed to improving caregiver quality of life, lowering caregiver anxiety, improving social support, pain management and problem solving skills. Our interventions are based upon needs identified by hospice staff, caregivers and patients. We advocate extensive participatory evaluation in all our projects. Our interventions are based upon a solid conceptual framework known as ACT (Assessing Caregivers for Team Interventins).

Our collaborating hospice agencies are in several states including Missouri, Washington, Texas and Kentucky. Their client population covers large and diverse geographic areas of the country.