Find the Best Care for Your Loved One with Hospice Compare

Medicare recently launched a new site to help us find the best care for our loved ones with Hospice Compare. It’s a website aimed at helping us find the best care by sifting through the marketing pitches of the 30-40 hospices serving our area.

How do families rate their experience of care?

Once on the site, put in the zip code you’re looking for help in (say 77706 or 75951 ), and you’ll be presented with all the Medicare hospices that are licensed to serve that area. When you click on their name, you’ll get two sets of information: The top section is information from the Hospice Family satisfaction surveys sent out to the families of former patients of the hospice (in other words, not what the hospice says in their marketing, but how families actually report their care experience). 8 questions out of about 40 from the survey are included. The hospice’s results are in the left column and the national average for that question is in the right column. Spoiler: Compassion Hospice is rated significantly above national averages in every question. 🙂

What information does Medicare collect regarding quality of care?

The next section below are questions Medicare collects each quarter from licensed hospices regarding how patients are cared for on admission. Are patient’s care wishes discussed? Was their pain or shortness of breath taken care of? (if applicable). This information is collected from the hospice after each admission. Compassion Hospice is rated significantly above national averages in every question. 🙂

How does Compassion Hospice compare to other hospices in my area?

While on the site, you can compare up to 3 hospices at a time – click on the “compare” button of the 2 or 3 you’re considering and see how families rate their experience and Medicare reports their care. Compassion Hospice rates significantly higher than every other hospice in Southeast Texas 🙂

If you are looking for the best care for your loved one, please call Compassion Hospice at (409) 835-8357 .

For more information, be sure and check out a couple of articles on the web about the site:

America Academy of Family Physicians on Hospice Compare.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma, M.P.H., called the website “an important tool” that will help empower consumers in a “time of vulnerability” as they look for the details they need to make critical decisions about where to go for hospice care.

AARP discusses the Hospice Compare website.

this website could be particularly useful when, for example, the person needing hospice care lives in one part of the country and family members live somewhere else. “Something like this can really help give them a start,”