Quality of U.S. hospices varies, patients left in dark - The Washington Post
{Q}A boom in the industry allows patients to choose from an array of
hospice outfits, some of them excellent. More than a thousand new
hospices have opened in the United States in the past decade. But the
absence of public information about their quality, a void that is
unusual even within the health-care industry, leaves consumers at a loss
to distinguish the good from the bad.
Though the federal government publishes consumer data about the quality of other
health-care companies, including hospitals, nursing homes and home
health agencies, it provides no such information about hospices.
The reasons that some hospices stint on care may be at least partly
financial. Medicare, the chief source of industry revenue, pays hospice
companies per day of care — about $155 for a “routine” day — regardless
of how much care is actually provided. That means that the less a
hospice spends on nursing and other services, the more it can profit.
{EQ}
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/hospice-quality This database shows, among other things, whether the hospice has provided
more intense levels of care for patients suffering a crisis; how much
it spends on nursing visits per patient; and whether it has won approval
from one of three outside accrediting agencies, the Joint Commission, the Accreditation Commission for Health Care and Community Health Accreditation Program, or CHAP
