Pre-Conference Workshops

The 2025 CAPC National Seminar will feature three half-day workshops on September 15, focused on billing, health equity, and leadership. Space for each workshop is limited, so be sure to register early to secure your spot.

Faculty: Katie DeMarco, DNP, MSHS, APN, ACHPN; Tom Gualtieri-Reed, MBA; Katy Hyman, MDiv, BCC; Russell Kieffer, APHSW-C; Sonia Malhotra, MD, MS, FAAP; Bethany Snider, MD, HMDC, FACP, FAAHPM; Donna Stevens, MHA

Leading palliative care teams requires confident communication skills and an ability to build influence and collaborative relationships across your organization. Effective leaders must navigate the challenges of shifting priorities, financial uncertainty, team conflict, and potential resistance with a constructive approach. Maintaining engagement, articulating a clear vision, sustaining patience, and projecting confidence can often feel like a delicate balancing act—and these pressures can contribute to burnout.

This interactive workshop will use realistic scenarios, collaborative learning, and practical frameworks to practice skills for responding in these common situations. Together, we will explore strategies for preparing to meet with financial partners, fostering team engagement, delivering and receiving feedback, navigating organizational politics, and understanding the nuances of your leadership role. Join us to enhance your leadership capabilities and build resilience in your practice.

Faculty: Christopher Jones, MD, MBA, FAAHPM; Phillip Rodgers, MD, FAAHPM

While billing has not historically captured the true value of palliative care in our health care system, it remains an important component of program financing—and billing opportunities have improved over time. The savvy palliative care program leader will optimize their billing practices for program growth and sustainability, but understanding how to navigate billing complexity is key. This hands-on preconference workshop will examine the fundamentals of billing and coding, then dive into strategies to help programs meet productivity benchmarks and leverage new Medicare billing opportunities.

• An overview of MDM billing, including when and how it should be applied. We’ll discuss the importance of accurately valuing the work palliative care teams do, with a focus on avoiding underbilling.
• An introduction to time-based billing: when it is appropriate and what qualifies as billable time. We will clarify how to document and account for time in patient care to maximize revenue without compromising integrity.

• An exploration of reasonable productivity and Relative Value Unit (RVU) targets, highlighting how different billing strategies can help meet these goals. We’ll discuss which practices are most effective for hitting targets in a sustainable way.
• A review of recent changes and opportunities for primary care to capture revenue from previously underutilized activities such as principal illness navigation, chronic care management (CCM), community health integration (CHI), principal care management (PCM), and caregiver training. We’ll cover how to incorporate these into practice and the potential impact on overall revenue.

Faculty: Jackelyn Boyden, PhD, MPH, RN; Komal Chandra, PhD; Carine Davila, MD, MPH; Marisette Hasan, BSN, RN; Arika Patneaude, MHP, EMMHS, LICSW, APHSW-C; Andrya Rivera-Burciaga, DNP, FNP

The CAPC Health Equity Accelerator (Accelerator) combines a half-day workshop, extensive peer convening, and a year of mentoring on how to design and implement health equity initiatives for patients with serious illness. Developed with generous support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Accelerator is designed to empower health equity champions with case examples, best practices, and expert guidance from seasoned health equity leaders.

In this workshop, participants will learn best practices for planning, implementing, and monitoring the impact of a health equity quality improvement project—including how to garner needed resources. A range of health equity experts from a variety of care settings and organizations will provide their perspectives and lessons learned from their experiences developing sustainable health equity initiatives. Attendees will leave the event with an action plan to advance equity and improve care for marginalized patient populations with serious illness.

Following the workshop, attendees will participate in a year-long cohort of peer equity champions working to implement their initiatives. The program includes:

• Virtual Office Hours, small-group check-ins with an assigned health equity faculty mentor, occurring every two months to discuss progress and/or obstacles in implementing health equity initiatives
• Three post-workshop large-group virtual convenings to highlight the evolving work being led by the cohort
• Opt-in cohort directory to facilitate peer-to-peer communication throughout the year
• Participant survey upon completion of the year-long program to capture information about progress of health equity initiatives, satisfaction with/usefulness of the Accelerator, and lessons learned to share with other health equity leaders

Note: Participation in this pre-conference workshop assumes that attendees take part in the year-long virtual program that follows.