Bringing awareness to the dedication of Mount Evans Home Health Care & Hospice sta

310,880. T hat’s the number of miles clinicians drove last year for Mount Evans Home Health Care & Hospice to see their patients. 310,800 miles . And Mount Evans wasn’t reimbursed for a penny of it.

I was on the board there for 12 years but only learned about this uncompensated cost at a meeting this month for former board members like me.

ese clinicians drive from the eastern edge of the foothills to the Continental Divide. at means all of Clear Creek County, all of Gilpin County, Park County clear out to

Kenosha Pass, and the mountain parts of Je co, including not just Evergreen and Conifer but also Golden and Morrison.

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Greg Dobbs

For the almost 60 who work in the eld — nurses and therapists, social workers, certi ed nursing assistants and chaplains — that’s a lot of driving. So let me give you that gure again: 310,800 miles. It’s important

LINDA SHAPLEY Publisher lshapley@coloradocommunitymedia.com

MICHAEL DE YOANNA Editor-in-Chief michael@coloradocommunitymedia.com

KRISTEN FIORE West Metro Editor kfiore@coloradocommunitymedia.com

CORINNE WESTEMAN Community Editor cwesteman@coloradocommunitymedia.com because while Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance companies pay a portion of the hospice and home health services that Mount Evans’s sta provide wherever patients live, they don’t compensate Mount Evans for what it takes to get there.

It’s not cheap. Like many commercial companies, Mount Evans pays the rate the IRS decrees, which for a while was 53.5-cents per mile but last year went up to 62.5-cents. Do the math and you see what it cost in 2022: more than $192,000. All of it has to be covered by supporters’ donations.

ERIN ADDENBROOKE Marketing Consultant eaddenbrooke@coloradocommunitymedia.com

AUDREY BROOKS Business Manager abrooks@coloradocommunitymedia.com

ERIN FRANKS Production Manager efranks@coloradocommunitymedia.com

LINDSAY NICOLETTI Operations/ Circulation Manager lnicoletti@coloradocommunitymedia.com e cost wasn’t always so high, because neither the patient load nor the cost of reaching patients was always so big. When Mount Evans was founded more than 40 years ago, it helped 15 hospice patients in its rst year. I went on the Mount Evans board in 2005 and at that point, the count had risen to 628 patients a year. When I was done 12 years later, it was over 900. Now that number has skyrocketed to more than 1,200. Maybe a more telling fact is that those 1,200+ patients last year had more than

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Golden Transript (ISSN 0746-6382)

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