Home Health & Hospice Week

Potential patients, referral sources, and others could be swayed by two recent studies pointing to groups of agencies perform better.

Nonprofit study: Rand Corp. researchers analyzed Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Hospice Survey data from 653,208 caregiver respondents, reflecting care received from 3,107 hospices between April 2017 and March 2019, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“Family caregivers reported worse care experiences at for-profit hospices than at not-for-profit hospices for all measures,” says the study abstract at https://jamanetwork. com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2801753. “Significant differences in average hospice performance by profit status remained after adjusting for hospice characteristics.”

Accreditation study: New York University College of Nursing researchers analyzed 7,697 agencies in the U.S. and found that “overall, accredited agencies performed better on the three commonly used quality indicators — timely initiation of care, hospitalization, and emergency department` visit,” according to the study abstract in Home Health Care Services Quarterly. “Not all the observed differences were substantial in absolute value,” cautions the abstract at www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621424.2022.2123756.

And who tends to be accredited? “Agencies that were for-profit, urban, not-hospital-affiliated, single-branch, Medicare enrolled only, and without hospice program were more likely to have accreditation,” the abstract notes.