Extending Your Care Team: How Palliative Services Support Physicians and Patients

June 2, 2025

Physicians and their care teams are naturally focused on delivering the best possible outcomes for patients. And managing complex cases often requires balancing treatment plans, addressing symptoms, and coordinating care across multiple disciplines—all while navigating time constraints.  

This is where palliative care comes in, not as a replacement for physician expertise, but as an extension of your care team. Specialized palliative care offers home-based and virtual services that enhance patient outcomes while keeping practices focused on what they do best: treating patients.

Unfortunately, nearly 60% of patients who could benefit from palliative care do not receive it. That’s according to a recent NEJM Catalyst Insights Report on the power of palliative care.

Palliative care should be as ubiquitous as hospice care within the health care industry. If 60% of patients who would benefit aren’t receiving it, there’s a real disconnect. — report co-author Amy Compton-Phillips, M.D., executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Providence St. Joseph Health, Seattle, WA.

While lack of awareness remains a significant barrier to palliative care expansion, the clinical benefit to providers, patients, and healthcare cost savings are contributing to the growing interest in this specialty. 

At its core, palliative care is specialized medical care designed to improve quality of life for patients with serious illnesses alongside curative or disease-modifying treatments.

Vynca Palliative Care for Patients

Palliative care isn't necessarily for the end of the road. It's for when the road gets hard. At Vynca, we define palliative care as specialized medical support for people living with serious illness — focused on relief from symptoms, clarity around choices, and care aligned with what matters most. It's not hospice. It's not about giving up. It's about getting more:

  • More clarity through meaningful conversations — helping patients understand their options and document their goals
  • More comfort with expert management of pain, symptoms, and medications to improve quality of life
  • More control with emotional, practical, and spiritual support that honors what matters most to each person

For physicians and specialists, palliative care provides an extra layer of support by managing time-intensive issues such as symptom control, advance care planning, and psychosocial challenges. The physician maintains the central role in disease management while ensuring patients’ broader needs are met.

The Value of Palliative Care for Physicians

Integrating palliative care in physician and specialty practices delivers measurable benefits and improved outcomes for both patients and providers, including:

  • Operational Efficiency: Palliative care teams handle complex discussions and symptom management between visits, freeing up your time for high-value treatments and procedures. 
  • Higher Patient Retention: Practices integrating palliative care report reduced no-show rates; increased patient throughput; reduced leakage; extended care duration; and more follow-up visits.
  • Alignment with Value-Based Care Models: By reducing acute care utilization and supporting timely transitions to hospice when appropriate, palliative care helps practices meet quality metrics and achieve shared savings under value-based contracts.
  • Improved Patient Outcomes: Vynca’s model has demonstrated a:
    • 43% reduction in emergency department visits and 52% reduction in hospital admissions, benefiting workflow and practice management
    • 79% advance care planning document completion (vs 28% nationally)
    • 81% symptom burden reduction after 6-weeks
    • 95% Patient satisfaction score

How Vynca Supports Your Practice

At Vynca, we partner with providers to orchestrate and deliver comprehensive palliative care that aligns seamlessly with physician practice workflows through: 

  • Symptom Management—including 24/7 access to manage pain, anxiety, and other symptoms proactively—reducing the likelihood of acute episodes or hospitalizations.
  • Care Coordination—navigating fragmented healthcare systems by collaborating with specialists, primary care providers, and community resources. 
  • Technology-Enabled Care—using Vynca’s AI-powered remote monitoring and predictive analytics to identify rising-risk patients early and intervene before complications escalate.
  • Optimized Hospice Length of Stay (53-day median)—helping to avoid late referrals and allowing more time for hospice teams to optimize pain management.

Unlike other organizations that offer palliative services as an adjunct to hospice or home health programs, the Vynca model is built around supporting patients with serious illnesses—wherever they are in their health journey. 

As a pioneer in technology-enabled palliative care, Vynca redefines how interdisciplinary teams deliver high-quality, patient-centered care at scale. Our hybrid approach combines in-person visits with virtual support to deliver more quality days at home while decreasing hospitalizations—improving outcomes for patients while reducing the administrative burden.

To learn more about how Vynca can support your practice, or to refer a patient today, visit vyncacare.com, email us at hello@vyncacare.com, or call 1-888-227-8884.