In Search of Hospice Information: Consumer Information Available on Hospice Compare and Yelp

Background: The hospice industry has expanded in recent years with limited oversight and few consumer-facing resources to assist consumers in selecting hospice agencies to care for their family members. Objectives: To better understand the availability of consumer-facing hospice information and how hospices are evaluated by these websites, this study examined two websites with national reach—the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Hospice Compare (HC) website and Yelp.com. We described Yelp hospice ratings and caregiver-reported ratings on HC and compared conceptually related HC ratings to each other. Methods: We collected hospice ratings from Yelp and hospice- and caregiver-reported quality indicators (QIs) from HC for all California hospices. We conducted descriptive statistics for all variables and conducted chi-square to examine differences in proportions for categorical variables. We conducted Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) to test the strength of the association between the hospice-reported pain assessment QI and the caregiver-reported indicators on HC. Results: Among our sample of 1040 California hospices, HC reported QIs for 200 (19.2%) hospices for the caregiver-reported QIs ranging to 448 (43.1%) hospices for the hospice-reported QIs. Just 236 hospices (22.7%) had a Yelp review. Hospice ratings on both Yelp and HC were fairly high. For-profit hospices were less likely to show HC QIs or to be rated on Yelp. Caregiver-reported HC ratings for pain and symptom management were significantly lower than conceptually related HC hospice-reported QIs. Conclusions: More research is needed to understand the lack of hospice representation on HC and investigate the usefulness of hospice-reported HC measures.