For-profit firms provide less in hospice care [View all]
The influx of for-profit companies into the hospice field has benefited patients, advocates say, because the commercial companies made big investments in technology, focused on efficiency and made care more accessible.
But a Washington Post analysis of hundreds of thousands of U.S. hospice records indicates that, as those companies transformed a movement once dominated by community and religious organizations into a $17 billion industry, patient care suffered along the way.
On several key measures, for-profit hospices as a group fall short of those run by nonprofit organizations.
The typical for-profit hospice:
●Spends less on nursing per patient.
●Is less likely to have sent a nurse to a patient’s home in the last days of life.
●Is less likely to provide more intense levels of care for patients undergoing a crisis in their symptoms.
The quality of individual hospices varies widely. In some cases, for-profit hospices provide service at levels comparable to nonprofits, according to the review. But the data analysis, based on hundreds of thousands of Medicare patient and hospice records from 2013, shows that the gap between the for-profits as a whole and nonprofits is striking and consistent, regardless of hospice size.
full story http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/for-profit-firms-provide-less-in-hospice-care/ar-BBhfEzT?ocid=iehp
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