Mastodon Choosing a Hospice: Reviewing the Washington Post's Consumer Guide to Hospice ~ Pallimed

Friday, October 31, 2014

Choosing a Hospice: Reviewing the Washington Post's Consumer Guide to Hospice

by Dale Lupu

How many times has a friend, a relative or a colleague asked me to recommend a good hospice in Reno or Redding or Rockford and I was flummoxed. Even if I knew the medical director or the executive director from work on national committees and thought he or she was a great, what did I really know about the quality of service provided by their hospice? I often wished I could have access to the kind of data I typically review when consulting with a hospice - their length of stay, proportion of patients living in a nursing home, proportion of patients discharged alive, readiness to provide continuous care, robustness of the on-call service, etc.

Now, at least some of that information is available on-line through a website developed by the Washington Post. The key information in the new Consumer Guide to Hospice is taken from Medicare cost reports and "other sources." One can see the size of the hospice, age, ownership type, amount of continuous care or general inpatient care provided, and spending per day on therapy, doctors, and nursing.  The database also reports a hospice's "profit" per day, a label I find highly misleading (more on that below).

Is this information helpful?

In a limited way, yes. I would advise people to look first at accreditation status. Only 40% of hospices are accredited, and I would always lean towards an accredited program when available. Although accreditation tends to focus more on structure and processes than on outcomes, a program that has been accredited has had objective outside reviewers who have given it a stamp of approval. That speaks to a program's willingness to open itself to review and, hopefully, improvement.

Next, focus on size and age of the hospice. As in almost every other part of medicine, practice is linked to higher quality. Experience - gained over time and gained over a number of cases, usually helps build both individual clinician expertise and organizational/team expertise. Very new and very small hospices are unlikely to have the breadth of experience and the depth of resources to assist with challenging or unusual circumstances. Unless I had a specific reason to know that a very small or very new hospice had a service or skill that was needed (such as a new pediatric service or a new hospice residence), I would stick with hospices with experience of at least 5 years (10 years is even better) and volume of at least 80 patients per day. Not always possible in a rural area - but rural areas may not offer a choice in any case.

Third, I would advise people to look at the proportion of "crisis care" - which I surmise was calculated as the number of continuous care and general inpatient days as a proportion of total days. (I cannot find specific methods notes explaining exactly how items were calculated - a drawback to the site.) The limitation in the "crisis care" number reported is it doesn't distinguish between continuous care at home and general inpatient care in a facility. A hospice which handles almost all crises in a contract hospital bed is not the same as one able to put in continuous care nursing in the home with a few hours notice - but patient's may strongly prefer one over another. Still, I'd want to pick a hospice that demonstrated it had SOME capacity that it used for crises care, rather than picking from the 14% of hospices that provided no crises care.

Third, I'd look at the "live discharge" rate. The Post justifies this number saying that large number of people leaving a hospice may indicate they are unhappy with the care and services. Maybe. More likely it represents a hospice had a very (maybe overly) open admission policy, taking people too early and too "healthy" and then discharging them. I would actually select hospices that had live discharge rates in the 10% to 20% range. Too few live discharges likely means the hospice is too tight and guarded in who they accept, and not willing to bend flexibly to each patient and family's needs. But too high a discharge rate - let's say over about one third - makes me uncomfortable too. Stay in the middle on this indicator.

Fourth - I would advise NOT looking at the $ per day. The data likely comes from the Medicare Hospice Cost Reports, which have all kinds of issues in how data is reported, especially when hospices run their own inpatient units. The so called "profit" is especially misleading. I can't tell exactly how the Washington Post calculated the number - but if, as I guess, it is everything left over after "allowable" Medicare costs, it is in no way all "profit" for a hospice. Recall, hospices are required to provide bereavement services without Medicare reimbursement. Many hospices plow money left over after nursing and doctor and therapy costs into community bereavement services, extensive community education, bridge programs, or other community services. The "profit" number doesn't give any indication whether these dollars are truly "profit" being returned to shareholders, reserves begin saved for a rainy day, or carefully husbanded resources that fund additional community services. As interesting as it is, I'd ignore that information when choosing a hospice.

The Consumer Guide allows you to filter by ownership status at the very start of a query, which seems to imply that ownership status ought to be part of one's consideration. But I don't find ownership status to be a very useful indicator. It's true that a lot of Medpac's recent policy analysis has focused on differences between not-for-profit and for-profit providers, and that some concerning trends are associated with for-profit providers.  But in my experience there are both good and not-so-good providers in both groups, and ownership status is not nearly as helpful in distinguishing between them as the other factors mentioned above.

Finally - I would advise supplementing the information in the Consumer Guide with careful telephone screening of any hospice being considered. I like the list of 16 questions to ask on the website of the American Hospice Foundation (disclosure: I was on the AHF board for many years.)

Many in our community have been upset at the way that the ongoing Washington Post series has emphasized problems in hospice care. I agree that those problems are not the rule - but we also can't ignore them. Giving consumers - and us, the supposed experts - the information to begin to sort out who is operating way outside of the norm - is a helpful step. I applaud the Washington Post for making this information accessible.

PS. Make sure your hospice checks - and corrects, if necessary - the information displayed about it. We have already heard from some organizations who noticed errant information for their site.

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