Home Health & Hospice Week

Hospice concurrent care makes economic as well as treatment sense, a new report finds.

Medicare Care Choices Model beneficiaries “were more likely to enroll in the Medicare hospice benefit than matched comparison beneficiaries, less likely to use hospital services and other health care services, and more likely to receive better-quality end-of-life care in the period between enrollment in MCCM and death,” the fourth annual report of the program concludes. “Decreased use of resource-intensive services, driven by earlier enrollment in the hospice benefit, resulted in lower Medicare expenditures,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in its assessment.

Specifically, “net expenditures (Medicare Part A and B expenditures plus MCCM payments) decreased by 14 percent ($7,254 per MCCM enrollee) from the date of MCCM enrollment through death, relative to a matched comparison group,” CMS says in an overview of the report.

The 192-page report is at https://innovation.cms.gov/ data-and-reports/2022/mccm-fourth-annrpt.