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

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. 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. 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. 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. More research is needed to understand the lack of hospice representation on HC and investigate the usefulness of hospice-reported HC measures.