Hospice & palliative care

Choosing a Hospice in the Columbus, OH Area

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Families across the Columbus metro, from Franklin County into Delaware, Fairfield, Licking, and the other surrounding counties, can use Care Compare and the CAHPS Hospice survey the way anyone in the country does. The local wrinkle is Ohio's own licensing system: the Ohio Department of Health inspects and licenses every hospice operating here, and its complaint and inspection history is a separate record worth checking alongside the federal quality data.

Last updated: July 2026

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What Actually Separates a Good Hospice From an Available One?

A hospice's quality does not show up in its name, its building, or how fast it can start care after a referral. It shows up in three kinds of public record: what families who used it later reported about their experience, how often patients were discharged alive and hospitalized shortly afterward, and whether the hospice is organized as for-profit or nonprofit. Comparing those records across every hospice serving the Columbus area is the real vetting work.

That vetting works the same way whether a family is searching from a downtown Columbus zip code or a rural stretch of Pickaway County, though the two zip codes will return different lists of certified providers. None of it replaces a direct conversation with a hospice's intake team about a specific patient's needs; it narrows the list worth having that conversation with.

Finding Every Medicare-Certified Hospice Serving the Columbus Metro's Ten Counties

Medicare's Care Compare tool lists every Medicare-certified hospice by ZIP code, along with the same quality measures CMS collects nationwide 1. The federal government defines the Columbus metro as ten counties: Franklin at the core, plus Delaware, Fairfield, Hocking, Licking, Madison, Morrow, Perry, Pickaway, and Union. A hospice search run from a Union County or Hocking County address will return a different, often shorter, list than one run from a Franklin County zip code.

That variation is not a flaw in the tool. Hospices choose and disclose which counties they are actually staffed to serve, and a hospice based in downtown Columbus does not necessarily reach every corner of a ten-county metro on the same schedule. Running the search from the specific zip code where care will actually happen, rather than a general "Columbus" search, is what surfaces the accurate list.

What the CAHPS Hospice Survey Actually Measures

The CAHPS Hospice Survey is a standardized questionnaire CMS mails to the primary caregiver of patients who died under hospice care, typically a few months afterward, asking about communication, help with pain and other symptoms, timeliness of care, training for family caregivers, and whether they would recommend the hospice to others 2. It feeds into the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, the system that requires every Medicare-certified hospice to submit data or face a payment penalty 3.

That retrospective design is also its limit. A caregiver answering months after a death is describing one family's experience with one patient's illness course, and Care Compare reports these as an aggregate score across a hospice's recent respondents, not a promise about any specific patient's experience. Reading several domains together, rather than only the overall recommend-us number, gives a fuller picture of where a hospice was strong and where families reported gaps.

Why Live Discharge and Ownership Both Show Up in the Research

Being discharged alive from hospice is not automatically a red flag; some patients stabilize and no longer meet the terminal prognosis. But researchers have found that patients discharged alive are more likely to be hospitalized, readmitted, or die in a hospital shortly afterward, and that pattern is more common at for-profit hospices and after unusually short stays 4.

A separate national analysis of CAHPS Hospice results found that family caregivers reported worse experiences, across every measured domain, at for-profit hospices compared with nonprofit ones, and were less likely to say they would recommend the hospice to others 5. Ownership alone does not settle the question for any single hospice serving the Columbus area — plenty of individual programs of either kind perform well — but it is a factor worth checking alongside the CAHPS scores, not instead of them.

Franklin County's Urban Core Versus the Metro's Rural Edge

A hospice licensed to serve the Columbus metro can mean very different things depending on which of the ten counties a patient lives in. Franklin County's dense, hospital-heavy core gives hospices more contracted options for general inpatient care when a symptom crisis cannot be managed at home, while counties like Hocking, Morrow, and Perry are more rural, with fewer nearby facilities and longer drive times for a nurse responding to a continuous-care crisis.

That difference does not show up on a hospice's Care Compare listing, which reports quality scores but not response times or facility partnerships by county. Asking directly how a hospice handles a middle-of-the-night crisis for a patient's specific address, not just its central Columbus intake number, is the way to surface it.

The Four Levels of Care and Where They're Actually Available Around Columbus

Medicare defines four hospice levels of care: routine home care, the everyday level most patients receive; continuous home care, for brief and intensive crisis periods at home; general inpatient care, for symptom management a home cannot handle; and inpatient respite care, up to five consecutive days for a caregiver's break 6. Not every hospice serving the Columbus area arranges all four the same way in every county it covers.

A hospice that reliably places patients in a contracted inpatient bed within Franklin County may lean on a different, farther facility for a family in Pickaway or Union County. Before enrolling, it is worth asking a hospice to name, specifically, where general inpatient care would happen for the address in question, not just that the level of care exists on paper.

Ohio's Own Licensing Record: What ODH Tracks Beyond CMS

Every hospice operating in Ohio, including all those serving the Columbus metro, must hold a state license from the Ohio Department of Health under the state's hospice care program rules, separate from federal Medicare certification. That state licensing record, including inspection findings and substantiated complaints, is public and does not appear on Care Compare, which only reports federally collected quality measures.

Checking a hospice's Ohio license status and complaint history alongside its CAHPS and live-discharge data covers more ground than either record alone. A hospice can carry federal certification while also carrying an open state complaint, and the two systems are tracked by different agencies with different websites.

Common questions

It can. Hospices choose and disclose which counties they are actually staffed to serve, and a search run from a Franklin County zip code often returns more results than one run from a more rural county in the same ten-county metro. Running the Care Compare search from the exact zip code where care will happen, rather than a general Columbus search, shows the accurate list.

A higher score is a reasonable tiebreaker, not a guarantee. CAHPS scores are averages built from family surveys collected months after a death, covering a limited number of respondents, and they say nothing about how a specific hospice would handle a specific patient's symptoms. The score works best alongside live-discharge data, ownership, and a direct conversation with the hospice's clinical team.

Complaints about a hospice's care standards in Ohio go to the Ohio Department of Health, the state agency that licenses and inspects hospices statewide, separate from CMS's Care Compare and CAHPS data. A family can raise a concern with both: the state agency for a licensing or care-standard issue, and CMS if the concern touches Medicare-reported quality measures.

Routine home care is the everyday level most hospice patients receive, wherever they live. General inpatient care is short-term, intensive symptom management that cannot be handled at home, provided in a hospital, hospice facility, or skilled nursing setting until symptoms are controlled. Continuous home care and inpatient respite care cover a brief home crisis and a caregiver's break, respectively.

No single ownership label guarantees an outcome for any one family. National research has found for-profit hospices score lower, on average, across CAHPS domains and show more burdensome live discharges, but averages describe an industry, not one program. A specific hospice's own public record, checked directly, matters more than its tax status alone.

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When to Escalate Beyond Comparison Shopping

  • —a hospice's on-call clinical line goes unanswered, or reaches only voicemail, during a symptom crisis
  • —pain, breathlessness, or agitation that isn't addressed within the response time the hospice promised in writing
  • —no clinician contact for several days after a family reports a real change in a patient's condition
  • —a hospice cannot say, specifically, where general inpatient care would happen for this patient's address

If a hospice patient is in acute distress and the hospice's 24-hour clinical line cannot be reached, call 911 and tell the dispatcher the patient is enrolled in hospice care.

This article explains how to read public hospice-quality data for the Columbus, OH area; it does not replace guidance from a hospice's own clinical team or a treating physician.

References

  1. 1.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice). Medicare.gov / Care Compare (CMS). link ✓Supports that Columbus-area families can search and compare Medicare-certified hospices by ZIP code on publicly reported quality and CAHPS measures.
  2. 2.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). CAHPS Hospice Survey. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). link ✓Supports what the CAHPS Hospice Survey is, who it samples, and which domains it measures.
  3. 3.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Hospice Quality Reporting Program. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). link ✓Supports the existence and structure of the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, including CAHPS Hospice, as the data source behind Care Compare.
  4. 4.Peer-reviewed cohort study (see article) (2024). Hospice Readmission, Hospitalization, and Hospital Death Among Patients Discharged Alive from Hospice. JAMA Network Open (PMC11099680). PMID 38753329 ✓Supports that patients discharged alive from hospice face higher rates of hospitalization, readmission, or hospital death, and that this is more common at for-profit hospices and after short stays.
  5. 5.Anhang Price R, Parast L, Elliott MN, et al. (2023). Association of Hospice Profit Status With Family Caregivers' Reported Care Experiences. JAMA Internal Medicine. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2022.7076 ✓Supports that family caregivers report worse experiences across CAHPS domains at for-profit hospices compared with nonprofit hospices.
  6. 6.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Medicare-Certified 4 Levels of Hospice Care. Medicare.gov / Care Compare (CMS). link ✓Supports the definitions of the four Medicare hospice levels of care.

6 sources, numbered by first appearance. General health information, not medical advice. AI-assisted editorial content — every citation independently verified. Editorial policy

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