Rainbow Hospice Care Rebrands to Rainbow Community Care: Ushering in a New Era for Understanding Wellness as We Age

Rainbow Hospice Care, a trusted local provider of hospice care for over three decades, proudly announces it is rebranding to Rainbow Community Care. This transformation reflects its Board’s longstanding commitment to provide a broad spectrum of services that supports patients and families throughout the entire aging journey, not just at end-of-life, and, in the process, improves the overall health of the communities the organization serves in rural southern Wisconsin.

“It has been a tremendous honor to be viewed as the area’s cornerstone hospice provider for so many years,” said Karen Carrig, Rainbow Community Care CEO. “Our vision began in 1990 with a small, but dedicated group of volunteers who recognized that advances in medical technology and treatment had added years to average life expectancy but changed where and how most of us were dying. These courageous women saw patients and families struggling to manage this new reality and felt it was their duty to create an organization whose people would be at their side with compassion, commitment and comfort. We are very proud how our reputation has evolved from this humble beginning to one that has consistently grown and has provided exceptional end-of-life care.”

Carrig also emphasized that Rainbow has been dedicated to helping people live well prior to the onset of terminal illness for many years.

"In 2003, for example, we added a new volunteer program that provides neighborly assistance to the elderly, disabled and seriously ill – folks who could benefit from receiving just a little extra non-medical help in order to remain living independently in their homes. A decade later, we added advance care planning and palliative care to our continuum of care followed more recently by community grief support services and parish nursing. What we discovered, however, is that a lot of people are not fully aware of this work.”

Thus, the decision to rebrand is very much a conscious effort by Rainbow to reframe how it is perceived.

Carrig added, “Perhaps the best way to think of Rainbow Community Care is as an umbrella term that allows us to better convey the breadth of the services we currently offer to the community, including hospice care, supportive care management, advance care planning, grief support, friends in action, and community health ministry. And, moving forward, as we add new programs that better meet the evolving needs of the vulnerable people living among us, the Rainbow Community Care name will take on even greater meaning.”

Interesting Facts about Rainbow

• Rainbow is one of the state’s few remaining local, independent, and non-profit providers of hospice care. Nationally, nearly 75% of hospices are for-profit.
• Over time, Rainbow - in collaboration with its local care partners – has turned Jefferson County into a place where more people choose to receive hospice care at end-of-life than almost everywhere else in the United States. In 2019, for example, Hospice Analytics - an expert in all things related to hospice claims and data – shared that Jefferson County ranked 35^th out of 3,143 counties (Top 1.1%) nationally in terms of the percentage of Medicare beneficiaries (67.6%) choosing to receive hospice care in their final days, weeks or months.
• Stories about the extraordinary care our teams provide are regularly published in local papers including the Cambridge News, Daily Jefferson County Union, Lake Mills Leader, and Watertown Daily Times.
• Last summer, Rainbow was among four organizations in the country selected by the producers of Viewpoint with Dennis Quaid to be the focal point of an upcoming short-form documentary series titled Hospice & Palliative Care: Serving Families with Honor & Compassion. The public television segment featuring Mr. Quaid and Rainbow will be distributed to public television stations throughout the United States in February of 2024.
• Rainbow recently opened an office in Beaver Dam to better serve northern Dodge and eastern Columbia counties.

The rebranding efforts of Rainbow Community Care encompass a refreshed visual identity, including a new logo, website and marketing materials. These changes reflect the organization's high-touch approach to delivering comprehensive care, while honoring its enduring commitment to the community.

For more information about Rainbow Community Care and its services, please visit www.RainbowCommunityCare.org.