Manager, Palliative Care (IKC)

10/30/2026

2000 16th St, Denver, Colorado, 80202-5117, United States of America

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 Function

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. This includes serious illness communication, goals-of-care conversations, advance care planning, and symptom-focused support. The role also 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, including serious illness communication, goals-of-care conversations, advance care planning, hospice referral pathways, concurrent hospice and dialysis, and conservative kidney management.

Other duties as assigned.

Education and Experience

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