Reading a Hospice on Medicare Care Compare

What does Care Compare show for a hospice?

Care Compare is the federal government's official tool for looking up Medicare-certified providers, and hospice is one of the provider types it covers 1Ref 1Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice).That Care Compare is the official public tool for finding and comparing Medicare-certified hospices, that listed hospices are Medicare-certified, and that quality and family-experience results are publicly reported on hospice profiles.. For each hospice it publishes two layers of evidence: results from a standardized survey completed by families after a death, and quality measures built from the hospice's own patient assessments and its Medicare claims 2Ref 2Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Hospice Quality Reporting Program.The existence and structure of the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, including standardized assessments, the CAHPS Hospice survey, and claims-based measures (a care-process composite and visits in the last days of life) that feed public reporting..

The site is free, public, and requires no account. Nothing on it is advertising. The data flow in through the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, the CMS program that Medicare-certified hospices report into 2Ref 2Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Hospice Quality Reporting Program.The existence and structure of the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, including standardized assessments, the CAHPS Hospice survey, and claims-based measures (a care-process composite and visits in the last days of life) that feed public reporting.. That is what separates it from review sites: the survey is the same instrument everywhere, the measures are computed the same way for every agency, and no hospice edits its own page.

The two layers answer different questions, and both matter.

The tool has real limits, covered further down. But it answers a family's first question — is there independent evidence about this agency, gathered from people who used it — with a flat yes.

How do you find hospices near you?

Choosing "hospice" as the provider type on medicare.gov/care-compare and entering a city or ZIP code produces a list of Medicare-certified hospices serving that area, each linking to a profile with its survey results and quality measures 1Ref 1Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice).That Care Compare is the official public tool for finding and comparing Medicare-certified hospices, that listed hospices are Medicare-certified, and that quality and family-experience results are publicly reported on hospice profiles.. Appearing in the tool at all carries information: it means the agency holds Medicare certification, the baseline credential behind the hospice benefit 1Ref 1Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice).That Care Compare is the official public tool for finding and comparing Medicare-certified hospices, that listed hospices are Medicare-certified, and that quality and family-experience results are publicly reported on hospice profiles..

Two practical notes. First, hospice care happens where the patient lives, so the office address on a profile matters less than the service area — the useful question for each agency is whether it serves the patient's exact address, which the profile does not always settle. Second, the list is a roster, not a ranking. A workable shortlist is every agency a discharge planner, physician, or friend has mentioned, plus one or two others from the list, compared side by side.

Searching by an agency's exact legal name also works, which helps when a hospital or nursing facility has already suggested a specific hospice and the family wants to look it up before agreeing.

What do the family survey scores mean?

They are answers from the people best positioned to judge. The survey behind them, the CAHPS Hospice Survey, goes to the patient's primary caregiver — usually a spouse or adult child — in the months after the death 3Ref 3Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).CAHPS Hospice Survey.That the CAHPS Hospice Survey samples primary caregivers of deceased hospice patients months after the death and measures domains including help for symptoms, communication, timeliness, overall rating, and willingness to recommend.. It asks about concrete experiences: whether the patient got help for pain and symptoms, how well the hospice team communicated, whether help came when it was needed, an overall rating, and whether the caregiver would recommend the hospice 3Ref 3Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).CAHPS Hospice Survey.That the CAHPS Hospice Survey samples primary caregivers of deceased hospice patients months after the death and measures domains including help for symptoms, communication, timeliness, overall rating, and willingness to recommend..

The instrument is standardized and validated, part of the CAHPS family of surveys overseen by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is what makes one hospice's results comparable to another's 4Ref 4Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2024).CAHPS Hospice Survey.That the CAHPS Hospice instrument is a standardized, validated family-experience survey, which is what makes results comparable across hospices.. Every hospice's families answer the same questions, asked the same way.

The timing of the survey is a feature. Because it arrives after the death, it covers the entire arc of care — including the final days, which are the hardest part of the job and the part a hospice cannot talk its way around.

Two results reward the closest reading. "Would recommend" compresses the whole experience into one answer from someone with nothing to sell. And help for pain and symptoms is the center of what hospice exists to do — an agency whose families say it fell short there fell short at the core.

Does hospice have star ratings?

The family survey appears on hospice profiles both as a summary result and as individual measure results, so two agencies can be compared question by question rather than only by the headline 1Ref 1Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Find Healthcare Providers: Compare Care Near You (Hospice).That Care Compare is the official public tool for finding and comparing Medicare-certified hospices, that listed hospices are Medicare-certified, and that quality and family-experience results are publicly reported on hospice profiles.. The detailed measures are usually more informative than the summary: two hospices with a similar overall mark can differ meaningfully on timeliness of help or on how well the team communicated, and those differences are exactly what a family is trying to predict.

How the summary is assembled, and why some hospices display no rating at all, is its own subject — a companion page on hospice star ratings covers the mechanics. The short version for a reader in a hurry: treat the summary as a first filter, then open the individual survey measures before drawing any conclusion about a specific agency.

What are the quality measures behind the ratings?

Beneath the survey sits the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, which collects standardized patient assessments and computes claims-based measures for Medicare-certified hospices; those measures feed what Care Compare publishes 2Ref 2Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Hospice Quality Reporting Program.The existence and structure of the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, including standardized assessments, the CAHPS Hospice survey, and claims-based measures (a care-process composite and visits in the last days of life) that feed public reporting.. Unlike the survey, these are not opinions. They are patterns in the hospice's own records and bills.

The claims-based measures include a composite index of care processes and a measure of whether patients received visits from the hospice team in the last days of life, both computed from Medicare claims rather than from anything the hospice chooses to report 2Ref 2Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Hospice Quality Reporting Program.The existence and structure of the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, including standardized assessments, the CAHPS Hospice survey, and claims-based measures (a care-process composite and visits in the last days of life) that feed public reporting.. The composite — the hospice care index — rewards agencies that keep showing up: visits, calls, care through the end. A companion page on hospice quality measures walks through each one and what a weak result tends to mean.

The general reading rule: the survey tells you how care felt; the claims-based measures tell you whether care showed up. An agency that is strong on both is offering consistent evidence from two independent directions. An agency with warm marketing and weak numbers on both is telling you something too.

Can Care Compare tell you about crisis and inpatient care?

Only partly, and the gap matters. Medicare defines four levels of hospice care: routine home care; continuous home care, for brief periods of crisis; general inpatient care, for symptom control that cannot be managed in other settings; and inpatient respite care, up to five consecutive days that give a family caregiver relief 5Ref 5Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Medicare-Certified 4 Levels of Hospice Care.The definitions of the four Medicare hospice levels of care: routine home care, continuous home care for brief crisis periods, general inpatient care for symptom control not manageable elsewhere, and inpatient respite care for up to five consecutive days.. All four are part of the benefit's design 5Ref 5Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2024).Medicare-Certified 4 Levels of Hospice Care.The definitions of the four Medicare hospice levels of care: routine home care, continuous home care for brief crisis periods, general inpatient care for symptom control not manageable elsewhere, and inpatient respite care for up to five consecutive days..

What a profile page cannot settle is how readily a particular agency actually mobilizes the crisis levels — whether continuous home care is genuinely staffed on a Saturday night, and where the agency's general inpatient beds physically are. Agencies differ widely there, in exactly the hours that matter most.

Those are telephone questions. A companion page on continuous and inpatient care lists the specific ones worth asking, starting with: when a patient here last needed continuous care, how quickly did it start?

What can't Care Compare tell you?

It reports averages and history, not promises. The scores describe how an agency performed for past patients in aggregate; they work well as a screen and have no power to guarantee any one family's experience. Some things families feel immediately — how fast the nurse line answers at 3am, whether the same nurse keeps coming, how the team handles a hard conversation — have no measure on the page. And because results are gathered over past reporting periods, a recent change in ownership or leadership may not be visible yet.

Ownership is a layer the profile does not foreground. A national analysis of the same family survey found that caregivers reported worse experiences at for-profit hospices than at not-for-profit hospices across every measured domain, on average, and were less likely to recommend them 6Ref 6Anhang Price R, Parast L, Elliott MN, et al. (2023).Association of Hospice Profit Status With Family Caregivers' Reported Care Experiences.That in a national CAHPS Hospice analysis, family caregivers reported worse care experiences across all measured domains at for-profit than at not-for-profit hospices on average, and were less likely to recommend them.. That is an average with wide overlap — excellent for-profit agencies and weak nonprofit ones both exist — but it is a reasonable prior to carry into the phone calls.

Care Compare is the anchor of hospice public quality data, not the whole of it. A companion page covers the rest of the vetting method, from what a blank profile means to the questions no database answers.

A worked example: two profiles, three numbers

Imagine two agencies on the same list. Hospice A shows a high would-recommend result, strong marks for help with pain and symptoms, and a middling result for timeliness of help. Hospice B shows the reverse: strong timeliness, weaker symptom help, and fewer families who would recommend it.

Neither profile decides anything yet, but each one now writes the phone script. For Hospice A, the question is operational: families valued the care, so what explains slower help — and who answers the after-hours line? For Hospice B, the question is clinical: help arrived fast, so what happened once it arrived — how does the team respond when pain is not settling?

That is the real use of the tool. The numbers rarely crown a winner outright; they convert a generic sales conversation into two specific interviews, and an agency's answers about its own weak spots are the most informative words in the whole process. An agency that acknowledges the weakness and describes what it changed is behaving like an organization that reads its own results. An agency that waves the numbers away has also answered the question.

A practical way to read two or three profiles

The method that works is narrow. Pick two or three agencies, open their profiles side by side, and write down the same three results for each: would recommend, help for pain and symptoms, and timeliness of help. The writing down matters — a warm admissions call is pleasant, but it is marketing, and the numbers on the page are not.

Then call each agency with the questions the data cannot answer:

• Who answers the phone at night — a nurse from this hospice, or an answering service?
• How quickly can someone come to the house in a crisis?
• How does continuous home care or inpatient care actually get arranged, and where?
• Does the agency serve this specific address?
• Has ownership or management changed in the last few years?

A companion page on comparing two hospices turns this into a worksheet. The same method compresses into a single afternoon when the hospital is asking for a decision by tomorrow — three numbers per agency and five questions by phone is enough structure to choose on evidence rather than on a brochure.