[Hiring] Manager, Palliative Care @DaVita Kidney Care

Role Description

The Manager, Palliative Care (IKC) will lead the DaVita IKC Palliative Care IDT team and is accountable for teammate performance, daily clinical operations, quality outcomes, and consistent execution of palliative care workflows. The Manager provides clear direction, coaching, and oversight to ensure the team delivers timely, high-quality, goal-concordant support for adults living with advanced chronic kidney disease, end-stage kidney disease, and serious comorbid illness.

This role partners with IKC leadership, nephrology practices, dialysis clinic teams, providers, health plans, hospice and palliative care partners, and other stakeholders to improve care coordination, strengthen access to supportive services, and ensure safe, therapeutic, ethical, and compliant patient care. The manager ensures confidential patient, teammate, and business information with discretion, sound judgment, and adherence to privacy and compliance requirements in daily palliative care operations and stakeholder communication.

Essential Functions:

• Leads the Palliative Care IDT team by setting clear expectations, providing supportive coaching and performance feedback, and promoting accountability for quality, timeliness, documentation, teammate engagement, and patient-centered outcomes.
• Applies strong knowledge of palliative care and renal palliative care principles, including serious illness communication, goals-of-care conversations, advance care planning, and symptom-focused support.
• Supports hospice referral pathways, concurrent hospice and dialysis, conservative kidney management, and compassionate care transitions for patients living with advanced CKD, ESKD, and complex serious illness.
• Owns daily team operations, including referral management, patient prioritization, interdisciplinary case review, escalation pathways, documentation expectations, closed-loop communication, and follow-through with internal and external partners.
• Monitors and improves performance using clinical, operational, and quality data, including trends related to referral completion, advance care planning, hospice and palliative care connections, care transitions, patient and caregiver experience, and avoidable acute care utilization.
• Builds strong cross-functional relationships with IKC leadership, nephrology practices, dialysis clinic teams, providers, health plans, hospice agencies, palliative care partners, and other stakeholders to remove barriers and strengthen care coordination.
• Supports development, refinement, and implementation of palliative care workflows, education, tools, and program improvements.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Active, unrestricted clinical license in good standing, appropriate to discipline and state requirements is required.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in palliative care, hospice, nephrology, advanced chronic illness, complex care management, or a closely related clinical setting is required.
• Demonstrated experience using quality and clinical/operational data monitoring to lead teammate accountability and overall process improvements that drive outcomes, strengthen practice consistency, and support reliable patient-centered performance is required.
• Intermediate computer skills and proficiency in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, electronic medical record systems, documentation tools, and reporting or tracking systems is required.
• Bachelor’s degree in nursing, social work, healthcare administration, or related field is preferred.
• Renal, dialysis, CKD, or ESKD care experience is preferred.
• Certification in hospice and palliative care, case management, nephrology nursing, nephrology social work, healthcare quality, or related specialty is preferred.
• Travel up to 25% is required.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) match, paid time off, PTO cash out.
• Support for you and your family: Family resources, EAP counseling sessions, access to Headspace®, backup child and elder care, maternity/paternity leave and more.
• Professional development programs: DaVita offers a variety of programs to help strong performers grow within their career and also offers on-demand virtual leadership and development courses through DaVita’s online training platform StarLearning.

Company Description

At DaVita, we strive to be a community first and a company second. We want all teammates to experience DaVita as "a place where I belong." Our goal is to embed belonging into everything we do in our Village, so that it becomes part of who we are. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and comply with state and federal affirmative action requirements.