Eli's Hospice Insider

Hospices continue to take a beating in the national press. Two new articles from The Washington Post and Huffington Post take for-profit hospices to task for quality of care issues.

The seventh in the Washington Post’s “Business of Dying” series of articles notes the problems with hospice patients that don’t have a nursing visit in their last days of care. “While hospices of both kinds usually dispatch a nurse to see a patient at some point during the last two days of life, for-profit hospices are more likely to fail in this regard,” according to the Post’s analysis of 2013 claims data.

“A typical patient at a for-profit hospice is 22 percent less likely to have been visited by a nurse during this window than a patient at a nonprofit hospice, the numbers show, a sign that for-profit hospices may be less responsive during this critical time.”

The HuffPost article, “Hospice Inc.,” focuses on failings in the Medicare survey system. “HuffPost found that a majority of the top [survey] offenders over the last 10 years — including the few hospices that lost their licenses — were for-profits,” the news site says.

See the articles at www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2014/12/26/a7d90438-692f-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html and http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/hospice-inc/top-offending-hospices-rarely-punished.