Hospice & palliative care

Choosing a Hospice in Oregon: Reading the Public Data

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This guide walks through what Oregon's public hospice data actually shows, how the state's Health Care Regulation and Quality Improvement office handles complaints, what the Oregon Health Plan covers through its regional coordinated care organizations, and the extra questions worth asking in rural and frontier counties where the choice of agencies is often thin.

Last updated: July 2026

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What does Medicare's public data show about a hospice?

Every Medicare-certified hospice operating in Oregon, along with every hospice nationwide, feeds data into the same federal reporting system, so the fastest way to compare two agencies is Medicare's own tool rather than a directory or review site. The Hospice Quality Reporting Program requires standardized measures from every certified hospice, covering both patient assessments and claims-based data 1, and Care Compare turns those measures into a searchable, filterable public page anyone can use without an account 2.

The centerpiece of that data is the CAHPS Hospice Survey, a survey mailed to a caregiver of record a few months after a patient's death. It asks how well the team controlled pain and other symptoms, how clearly staff communicated, how quickly they responded to calls, and whether the caregiver would recommend the hospice to family or friends 3. A companion guide on judging hospice quality walks through how to weigh those domains against each other and against the staffing and outcome measures also shown on Care Compare — the method itself does not change state to state, only the specific numbers attached to each agency do.

How does Oregon license hospices and investigate complaints?

Oregon hospices are licensed and inspected by Health Care Regulation and Quality Improvement, a section of the Oregon Health Authority's Public Health Division, which also takes complaints from patients and families and keeps a public licensing record for every agency it certifies. As of 2026, Oregon lawmakers have temporarily paused the issuing of new hospice licenses while the agency writes stricter licensure-review rules, with exceptions for existing hospices expanding their service area and for providers serving underserved communities.

That pause does not shrink the list of hospices a family can already choose from. Every hospice licensed in Oregon before the pause keeps operating and keeps showing up on Care Compare — the rulemaking only slows how many new agencies can open, not how many are already available. A complaint about an existing hospice can be filed with the Oregon Health Authority by phone, mail, or an online form, and state rules protect the complainant's identity through the review. The office checks a complaint against Oregon's own administrative rules and, for Medicare-certified hospices, against the same federal conditions of participation that Care Compare's data is drawn from — so a complaint and a quality score are two views of the same underlying standard, not two separate systems.

What does the Oregon Health Plan cover, and who coordinates it?

The Oregon Health Plan, the state's Medicaid program, covers hospice care as a standard benefit, but for most members that coverage is coordinated through one of sixteen regional coordinated care organizations rather than the state directly. A CCO is the practical point of contact for an Oregon Health Plan member choosing hospice: it can confirm which agencies it works with in that member's county and help coordinate the handoff from whatever care the person was receiving before.

This is a real difference from how Original Medicare handles hospice, where a beneficiary can choose any Medicare-certified hospice directly with no network to check first. An Oregon Health Plan member should confirm with their CCO, before assuming, whether a specific hospice is one it works with locally — a call worth making early, since sorting out Medicaid coordination mid-crisis is harder than confirming it in advance. Someone eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid usually has hospice paid through Medicare regardless, with the Oregon Health Plan covering related costs Medicare does not, such as room and board in some nursing-facility situations.

Choosing a hospice in rural or frontier Oregon

Ten of Oregon's 36 counties are officially classified as frontier, meaning six or fewer people per square mile, and roughly a third of Oregonians live in a rural or frontier county where only about one in six of the state's health care providers actually practices. Ten of Oregon's 36 counties are classified as frontier. In practice that usually means fewer hospice agencies cover a given county, staff travel farther between visits, and a family may be choosing between two agencies instead of six.

None of that changes what is worth asking — it changes which answers matter most. In a frontier county, the specific questions to press on are how quickly a nurse can reach the home in person for a crisis versus by phone, whether the hospice uses telehealth to support visits between in-person ones, and what the agency's own average response time looks like for that specific service area rather than the county's average. A hospice covering a large, sparsely populated county should be able to describe its after-hours coverage in concrete terms, not general reassurance.

How hospice interacts with Oregon's Death with Dignity Act

Oregon was the first state to legalize medical aid in dying, and a hospice patient does not have to choose between hospice care and that option — someone can be enrolled in hospice while separately pursuing the Death with Dignity Act. What varies is not eligibility but participation: an attending or consulting physician is required to tell a qualifying patient about hospice and comfort care as an alternative, but individual hospices differ in how directly their own staff take part once a patient has made the request.

For a family where this matters, it is worth asking a hospice directly, before enrolling, how it handles a patient who is also pursuing the Death with Dignity Act — whether hospice staff can be present, whether the hospice continues routine visits and symptom care throughout, and whether anything about enrollment would change if the patient's plans change. There is no single Oregon-wide answer to any of those questions; it depends on the individual hospice's own policy, which is precisely the kind of thing a public data set cannot tell a family and a phone call can.

What else separates one hospice from another?

Ownership type and live-discharge patterns are two of the strongest predictors of a family's day-to-day experience, and neither shows up as a single number on Care Compare. A national analysis of CAHPS Hospice results found that family caregivers report worse experiences across every measured domain — symptom management, communication, timeliness, and willingness to recommend — at for-profit hospices compared with nonprofit ones 4.

Patients discharged alive from hospice rather than staying enrolled through death face a meaningfully higher chance of hospitalization or dying in a hospital afterward, and that pattern shows up more often at for-profit agencies and among patients with short hospice stays 5. Neither fact is a verdict on any specific agency — they describe average differences across large numbers of hospices, not a guarantee about one — but they are reasonable questions to ask directly: is the hospice for-profit or nonprofit, and roughly what share of its patients are discharged alive rather than staying through the end of life? It is also worth confirming which of Medicare's four defined levels of care a hospice actually staffs in that county — routine home care, continuous home care for a brief crisis, general inpatient care for symptoms that cannot be managed at home, and short inpatient respite, capped at five consecutive days, for caregiver relief 6 — since not every hospice serving a rural county can deliver all four without transferring the patient elsewhere.

Common questions

No. The pause applies only to brand-new hospice licenses while the state rewrites its review rules; it does not remove any hospice that is already licensed and operating. Every currently licensed Oregon hospice still appears on Medicare's Care Compare, and a family can still compare and choose among all of them the same way it always could.

Yes. Hospice enrollment is a choice a patient or their representative can change at any time, and a new hospice can pick up care without a gap if the switch is coordinated between the two agencies. If the reason for switching involves a safety concern, that is also worth reporting to the Oregon Health Authority's complaint process, separately from making the switch.

Both cover hospice care as a core benefit, but the details differ. Original Medicare lets a beneficiary choose any Medicare-certified hospice directly. Oregon Health Plan members typically go through one of the state's coordinated care organizations, which is worth contacting first to confirm which agencies it works with in a member's county before assuming every certified hospice is reachable the same way.

Not necessarily. A patient can be enrolled in hospice while separately pursuing Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, but hospices vary in how directly their staff participate in that process. A family for whom this matters should ask a hospice about its position before enrolling rather than assuming.

A thin field doesn't remove the value of comparing what is available. The same questions — CAHPS scores, live-discharge patterns, staffed levels of care, and after-hours response — still separate a stronger option from a weaker one, and an agency serving a large frontier county can be asked specifically how it handles distance and after-hours symptom crises.

Medicare's Care Compare tool lets anyone search hospices by state or county and see their CAHPS Hospice Survey results and other quality measures side by side. It is the same public tool used nationwide, and it is free to search without an account.

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When a hospice's responsiveness itself becomes the concern

  • —No call back from the hospice's on-call nurse within the time the hospice itself promised, during uncontrolled pain, breathlessness, or agitation.
  • —A caregiver told to simply wait until the next business day for a symptom that is actively distressing the patient.
  • —Being asked to make a comfort-kit medication decision without any nurse guidance on the phone.

If the patient's pain, breathing, or agitation is unrelieved and the hospice's on-call line does not respond, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department — the hospice can coordinate with the ER afterward.

This article explains how to read Oregon's public hospice-quality data, licensing, and complaint process. It does not recommend or rank any specific hospice and is not a substitute for guidance from a patient's treating clinician or hospice team.

References

  1. 1.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Hospice Quality Reporting Program. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). link ✓Establishes that Medicare requires standardized quality measures from every certified hospice nationwide, feeding public reporting.
  2. 2.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice). Medicare.gov / Care Compare (CMS). link ✓Supports that Care Compare is the public tool for comparing Medicare-certified hospices on quality and CAHPS measures.
  3. 3.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). CAHPS Hospice Survey. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). link ✓Describes what the CAHPS Hospice Survey measures and how it is administered to a caregiver of record after a patient's death.
  4. 4.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 versus nonprofit hospices.
  5. 5.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 odds of burdensome transitions, more often at for-profit agencies and with short stays.
  6. 6.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024). Medicare-Certified 4 Levels of Hospice Care. Medicare.gov / Care Compare (CMS). link ✓Defines Medicare's four hospice levels of care, used to ask what a hospice actually staffs locally.

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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