Hospice & palliative care

Choosing a Hospice in New Jersey: Reading the Public Data

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New Jersey families can compare hospices on CMS's Care Compare site and read CAHPS survey results, the same national tools used everywhere, but New Jersey-specific facts matter too: state law explicitly exempts hospice from Certificate of Need review, the state's density shapes travel distances differently than rural states, and NJ FamilyCare pays nursing-facility room and board at a set Medicaid rate.

Last updated: July 2026

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How Do You Start Choosing a Hospice in New Jersey?

Start with the same national data every family can use — Medicare's Care Compare tool and CAHPS Hospice survey scores — then add what's specific to New Jersey: a state licensing process that, unusually, exempts hospice from the Certificate of Need review most health facilities must clear, plus a hospice landscape packed into the country's most densely populated state. The method for judging hospice quality is national; New Jersey's regulatory posture toward hospice specifically is not.

That exemption is unusual enough that it's worth understanding on its own, since most families researching hospice assume every licensed health service in New Jersey goes through the same need-based review.

Who Licenses Hospices in New Jersey

New Jersey hospices are licensed by the state Department of Health under N.J.A.C. 8:42C, the Hospice Licensing Standards, which require a hospice to already hold federal Medicare certification before the state will issue or renew its license — the reverse order from how some other license types work. Both approvals have to be current for a hospice to legally operate and bill for care.

That sequencing means a New Jersey hospice's Medicare certification status is effectively a prerequisite check a family can rely on if the program is state-licensed at all, since the state won't license one without it already in place — a small but useful shortcut when comparing two programs quickly.

Why New Jersey Exempts Hospice from Certificate of Need

New Jersey runs one of the country's more active Certificate of Need programs for health facilities generally, but state law specifically exempts a licensed hospice care program from that Certificate of Need requirement — a carve-out most other CON states, including several bordering New Jersey, do not extend to hospice. In practice, that means a new hospice can seek a New Jersey license without first proving to a state review board that the market needs it.

This doesn't say anything about how any specific hospice performs — it affects how easily new programs can open, not the quality of an existing one, which is still best judged through the CAHPS and Care Compare data described later in this article.

Hospice Density in the Nation's Most Crowded State

New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, packed with hospitals and health systems inside a relatively small geographic footprint, which generally means shorter travel distances between a family's home and a hospice's office than in more rural states. That density doesn't guarantee every level of hospice care is equally close, though — a hospice's home office being nearby is different from its having a general inpatient bed nearby.

Asking a specific hospice which of the four Medicare-defined levels of care it delivers directly, and which would require transferring to a contracted hospital unit, is a reasonable question even in a state this compact 1.

Hospice Coverage Under NJ FamilyCare

NJ FamilyCare, New Jersey's Medicaid program, covers hospice care for eligible members, and most enrollees needing ongoing long-term care are covered through Managed Long Term Services and Supports, which coordinates services including hospice through a small set of contracted managed-care organizations rather than fee-for-service Medicaid. The hospice benefit itself still follows the same federal structure used nationally.

For an NJ FamilyCare member living in a nursing facility, Medicaid pays the hospice a room-and-board rate for that stay set at 95 percent of the facility's approved Medicaid per diem rate 2, rather than the family covering room and board separately once hospice starts.

Reading a Hospice's Public Quality Record

Every Medicare-certified hospice serving New Jersey reports quality data anyone can look up for free on CMS's Care Compare website 3, including CAHPS Hospice Survey results, which ask family caregivers of patients who died on hospice about pain and symptom management, communication, timeliness, and whether they'd recommend the program to others 4. None of it requires a phone call or a sales pitch to access.

The full method for reading these numbers — what a strong versus weak profile looks like, and how much weight to give a small number of completed surveys — lives in Gale's guide to judging hospice quality; in New Jersey, the same lookup applies no matter how many hospices happen to serve a given county, and the results are refreshed on a regular public reporting schedule.

What Ownership and Live-Discharge Rates Signal

Nationally, family caregivers report a meaningfully better hospice experience — across pain control, communication, and timeliness — when the hospice is not-for-profit rather than for-profit 5, and problematic live discharges, where a patient leaves hospice alive under circumstances that look more like a business decision than a clinical one, are documented as more common at for-profit hospices 6. Both facts are public record, worth checking alongside a hospice's CAHPS score.

That pattern doesn't settle which specific New Jersey hospice is the right fit — it describes thousands of agencies nationally, not a verdict on any single program — but it's a reasonable second filter once a hospice's own quality data is in hand.

If You're Coordinating Care Across State Lines

Some families researching hospice in New Jersey are simultaneously coordinating care for a relative somewhere else. The lookup tools don't change from state to state — only the licensing rules and Certificate of Need posture do — so the same approach applies to hospice quality in New Mexico, hospice quality in New York, hospice quality in Alabama, hospice quality in Pennsylvania, hospice quality in Tennessee, and hospice quality in New Hampshire.

A hospice's state license, its Certificate of Need status — or exemption, as in New Jersey — and its complaint record are the pieces that don't transfer from one state's page to the next, which is why this guide covers New Jersey on its own.

Common questions

No. New Jersey law specifically exempts licensed hospice care programs from the Certificate of Need requirement that applies to most other health facilities in the state, a carve-out several neighboring states don't offer. It affects how easily new hospices can open, not how well an existing one performs.

Yes, and New Jersey requires it in a specific order: a hospice must already hold federal Medicare certification before the state Department of Health will issue or renew its license under N.J.A.C. 8:42C, so a state-licensed hospice is necessarily Medicare-certified as well.

For most hospice patients with Medicare Part A, the hospice benefit covers team visits, medications related to the terminal diagnosis, equipment, and the levels of care described in this article, with little to no cost-sharing for most services — though room and board in a nursing facility is generally not covered unless Medicaid also applies.

Yes. Enrolling with one hospice is not permanent — a patient can revoke the hospice benefit or transfer to a different Medicare-certified hospice, and it's reasonable to ask a prospective agency directly how a transfer would work before deciding, especially over communication concerns.

The state Department of Health's Health Facilities program oversees hospice licensing, surveys, and complaint investigations under N.J.A.C. 8:42C. CMS's Care Compare site is the fastest starting point for national quality and CAHPS survey data on any hospice licensed to serve New Jersey.

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When Choosing Can't Wait

  • —the patient appears to be actively dying (irregular or labored breathing, mottled skin, unresponsiveness) and no hospice is enrolled yet
  • —uncontrolled pain, severe breathlessness, or agitation with no clinician currently involved
  • —a new medical crisis — a fall, chest pain, a seizure — in a person not yet on hospice
  • —a family caregiver who no longer feels safe or able to manage care alone

A person in acute physical crisis needs 911 or the nearest emergency room regardless of where a hospice search stands; once a hospice is chosen and admission begins, its own on-call nurse line, staffed 24 hours, becomes the first call for pain and symptom changes.

This article explains how to read New Jersey's public hospice-licensing and quality data; it is not medical or legal advice and does not replace guidance from the patient's physician, a hospice intake team, or a local county office on aging.

References

  1. 1.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Medicare-Certified 4 Levels of Hospice Care. Medicare.gov / Care Compare (CMS). link ✓The four Medicare-defined hospice levels of care, used to explain what proximity to a hospice office does and doesn't guarantee.
  2. 2.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Hospice Payments (Medicaid). Medicaid.gov (CMS). linkHow Medicaid pays room-and-board for dually eligible nursing-facility residents on hospice, at roughly 95 percent of the facility rate.
  3. 3.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice). Medicare.gov / Care Compare (CMS). link ✓That consumers can publicly compare Medicare-certified hospices, including those serving New Jersey, on quality and experience data.
  4. 4.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). CAHPS Hospice Survey. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). link ✓What the CAHPS Hospice Survey measures: pain/symptom help, communication, timeliness, overall rating, willingness to recommend.
  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 ✓That family caregivers report better hospice experiences across domains at not-for-profit versus for-profit hospices nationally.
  6. 6.Teno JM, Plotzke M, Christian T, Gozalo P (2015). Characteristics of Hospice Programs With Problematic Live Discharges. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. PMID 26004403That problematic (burdensome) live-discharge patterns are more common at for-profit than not-for-profit hospices.

6 sources, numbered by first appearance. General health information, not medical advice. AI-assisted editorial content — citations link their sources. Editorial policy

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