Keys to Compassionate Care
Articles, encouragement, and practical know-how for every member of the hospice team.
Recent articles
Grief in Children: 7 Essential Lessons for Hospice Social Workers
Help children navigate grief. This guide for hospice social workers explores how kids understand death and offers research-backed tools for supportive care.
April 15, 2026 · 6 min read
Caregiving for Divorced Parents: Research on End-of-Life Care Quality
A recent study published in The Journals of Gerontology explores how marital status and social networks impact the quality of end-of-life care for older adults in the United States. Using data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), researchers analyzed ten dimensions of care. Three
March 30, 2026 · 3 min read
Hospice Ethics: Balancing Clinical Wisdom with Patient Quality of Life
Japan has long been the global benchmark for longevity, particularly among women. Traditional explanations have often pointed to a healthy diet and specific cultural practices. However, a new study published in BMC Medicine (2026) suggests a more complex reality. By comparing the entire population o
March 25, 2026 · 3 min read
Hospice Ethics: Why Clinical Wisdom is the Ultimate AI Safeguard
The healthcare landscape is rapidly evolving, moving beyond AI as a simple administrative tool toward its potential as an "Artificial Moral Agent." An intriguing article in the Hastings Center Report, "What Does Moral Agency Mean for Nurses in the Era of Artificial Intelligence?" (Ulrich et al., 202
March 22, 2026 · 4 min read
Understanding HQRP: The History of Hospice Quality
Hospice care, since its inception, has been about compassionate care. However, the underlying mechanisms of how it is paid for and how hospice quality is evaluated have undergone a significant transformation. This shift is part of a broader healthcare movement towards value-based care, moving away f
March 22, 2026 · 6 min read
How to Improve Your Hospice Revenue Cycle: 7 Key Questions
Our previous installments, Strategic Hospice Revenue Cycle Management and Hospice Billing: How to Build a Clean-Claim Process, established that a healthy revenue cycle is the engine that allows an agency to maintain stability and focus on its clinical mission. However, hospice leadership typically f
March 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Hospice Billing: How to Build a Clean-Claim Process
In our first installment on Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) – Silent Killers of Hospice Cash Flow (and How to Fix Them) – we discussed why consistent working capital is the foundation of an agency's operational stability. It impacts staffing levels, vendor relationships, and the leadership’s ability
March 15, 2026 · 5 min read
Silent Killers of Hospice Cash Flow (and How to Fix Them)
No hospice leader enters this field because they love claims and remittances. Their focus is not hospice cash flow optimization. Hospice leadership's goal is to ensure a dignified end-of-life journey for patients and families. They work to build an organization that can reliably deliver compassionat
March 15, 2026 · 5 min read
Why Hospice Care is Turning to Non-Traditional Technology
Hospice has always been rooted in human presence: symptom relief, careful listening, emotional support, and the work of helping patients and families live meaningfully in the time that remains. That should not change. But if hospice is truly about quality of life, then it is worth asking a serious q
March 15, 2026 · 9 min read
Analyzing the 'Quiet Workforce': New Insights into U.S. Family Caregiving
Many conversations about healthcare focus on hospitals, physicians, or emerging technologies. However, a significant portion of care in the United States occurs in a different setting: the home. Data from a recent Pew Research Center survey highlights the scale of this shift. Millions of Americans n
March 11, 2026 · 2 min read
ICU to Hospice Transitions Are Increasing. What Should We Measure Now?
What the study examined A new national study examined US Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries over age 65 who were admitted to an ICU between 2011 and 2023. The authors found that discharges to hospice after ICU admission increased substantially over time, including an increase in hospice discharg
March 6, 2026 · 2 min read
Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD): Analyzing Trends in Academic Literature
A recent narrative review published in Cureus examined trends in U.S. academic publications on Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). Rather than arguing for or against MAiD, the authors analyzed the scholarly literature itself. They reviewed recent peer-reviewed articles and categorized them by position (sup
February 26, 2026 · 1 min read
Will Generative AI Disrupt the Traditional Hospice Care Paradigm?
Recent reporting has highlighted how major health systems such as Mass General Brigham and Mayo Clinic are using Generative AI (GenAI) for clinical reasoning. These applications extend beyond administrative efficiencies and into the generation of preliminary diagnoses and treatment plans. For hospic
February 26, 2026 · 4 min read
How to Master the Hospice CBR for Better Compliance
Many hospice administrators are familiar with the hospice PEPPER report. A smaller number of hospice leaders, however, are familiar with its counterpart: the Comparative Billing Report (CBR) and eCBR, the electronic version of the Comparative Billing Report. While the PEPPER provides a general overv
February 1, 2026 · 6 min read
Why Early End-of-Life Conversations Are Important in Hospice Care
The hospice team often meets families at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. A loved one is nearing the end, emotions are raw, and time feels both urgent and suspended. What many families don’t realize – until they are in it – is how much harder this moment becomes when conversations
January 19, 2026 · 4 min read
Music, the Brain, and End-of-Life Care
A recent study published in PLOS ONE explores how music influences the way the brain processes, learns, and remembers information. The researchers found that listening to music – especially music that is familiar and predictable – can significantly affect attention, memory encoding, and cognitive se
January 19, 2026 · 3 min read
QAPI Documentation: How to Show Your Program is Active and Effective
Hospice leaders often understand that QAPI is required by CMS, but many do not know how to document the program in a way that proves it is genuinely active and effective. CMS surveyors want to see more than binders, charts, or paperwork. They are looking for documentation that demonstrates continuou
December 30, 2025 · 6 min read
How to Collect QAPI Data that Shows What Needs to Improve
In hospice, most organizations understand why Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) is required. What many do not understand is how to collect data in a way that reveals patterns, risks, and opportunities for improvement. QAPI data collection does not mean saving every report, printi
December 29, 2025 · 4 min read
What is the Hospice Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement Program?
A hospice Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) program is the formal system a hospice uses to understand how well it is functioning, where it is at risk, and how it will improve over time. Under 42 CFR § 418.58, CMS requires every hospice to maintain an ongoing, hospice-wide, data-d
December 29, 2025 · 6 min read
What Ethical Hospice Care Really Means at the End of Life
Hospice care is built on a simple promise: to support comfort, dignity, and quality of life when time is limited. Yet beneath that promise are complex ethical considerations that shape everyday decisions. These decisions include how symptoms are treated, how choices are honored, how families are sup
December 26, 2025 · 4 min read
How Can Virtual Nurses Improve Hospice at Home Quality of Care
Virtual nursing is rapidly gaining traction across healthcare, driven by workforce shortages and evolving expectations for care delivery. A recent JAMA Network Open article analyzing hospital-based virtual nursing offers important insights that extend well beyond acute care walls. While that researc
December 25, 2025 · 5 min read
Caring with Heart and Mind: Affective and Cognitive Empathy in Hospice Care
Empathy is often described as the heart of hospice care. It allows caregivers and hospice professionals to connect deeply with patients and families during one of life’s most vulnerable transitions. Yet empathy, when misunderstood or overextended, can become emotionally exhausting rather than sustai
December 21, 2025 · 5 min read
Invisible Crisis: Rural Healthcare in a City-Centered System
You don’t have to be a policy expert to notice something basic and uncomfortable about health care in the United States: Your chances of getting timely, good care change a lot depending on where you live. Roughly one in five people in the U.S. live in rural areas. Yet the system they interact with c
December 8, 2025 · 8 min read
Topological turning points across the human lifespan
This large-scale study analyzed 4,216 diffusion MRI brain scans from individuals aged 0 to 90. The aim of the study was to map how the brain’s structural wiring – the connections that allow different regions to communicate – changes throughout the entire human lifespan. The researchers examined how
December 7, 2025 · 3 min read
Why “Rate Your Pain From 0 to 10” Is More Complex Than It Seems
Pain assessment is foundational to clinical care, but nowhere is it more central – or more urgent – than in hospice. The familiar questions “How much pain are you in right now?” and “Is it better or worse than last week?” are routine. Yet, they are often quite difficult to answer and often yield ans
November 30, 2025 · 7 min read
Helping Aging Parents: How to Balance Safety, Independence, and Love
The Emotional Tension of Aging Parents As parents grow older, many adult children find themselves in a quiet emotional struggle. On one hand, you want to respect your parents’ independence – the routines they enjoy, the home they’ve built their lives around, the sense of control that still matters d
November 27, 2025 · 4 min read
AI At the End of Life: Help, Not a Decider
End-of-life decisions are some of the hardest moments any family, clinician, or hospice team will ever face. Even when a patient has had candid conversations with loved ones, the reality of decline can feel different than anything imagined. When there is no advance directive or clear documentation o
November 25, 2025 · 5 min read
Beyond the Diagnosis: Presence, Empathy, and Clinical Care
The multiple facets of healthcare In most conversations about healthcare, we talk about the clinical side first.Did the doctor order the right tests?Was the surgery successful?What did the scan show? Those questions matter, of course. But if you’ve ever been the patient in the bed – or the family me
November 25, 2025 · 7 min read
The Value of Timely Hospice Enrollment
Despite the clear benefits of hospice care, many patients are referred very late – sometimes in their final days of life – limiting the opportunity to benefit from its full scope. Two of the most commonly cited reasons for this delayed referral are: Together, these barriers contribute to the pattern
November 9, 2025 · 3 min read
What Is Hospice? Finding Meaning in Comfort and Care
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a Perspective titled “What Is Hospice?” – a piece that captures, in striking detail, what hospice truly means beyond the policies, programs, and checklists that are so often discussed in healthcare. It begins with a familiar question from a pati
November 9, 2025 · 3 min read
Hospice Voices and End-of-Life Choices: A Powerful Call for Compassion
A shift is unfolding across the United States as more states are enacting Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) laws. This legislation allows terminally ill, mentally capable adults with a prognosis of six months or less to request medication to end their lives peacefully. As of 2025, twelve U.S. jurisdiction
November 3, 2025 · 5 min read
The Role of HealthCare Workers in Shaping the Bereavement Journey
Loss is inevitable when working in end-of-life care. But the grief that follows is not simply the family’s burden alone. The way care is delivered before, at, and after the death of a loved one significantly influences whether bereavement becomes a manageable process or a complex, prolonged struggle
October 27, 2025 · 3 min read
Lifelong Learning in Hospice: Beyond CE Credits and Into Growth
A friend of mine recently celebrated her 70th birthday. In our conversation, she shared something that surprised and inspired me: about 20 years ago, she went back to school for over a decade. She earned a second bachelor’s degree, a master’s in gender studies, and even a law degree. Now, at 70, she
September 1, 2025 · 2 min read
Powerful Leadership Lessons from the Farm
For the past two years, I’ve spent every Sunday volunteering on a family farm. The farmer had lost many of her laborers, and the business – built over decades – was under real strain. Farming is far outside my area of expertise, but I felt strongly that it was important to help. If giving up [&helli
August 31, 2025 · 3 min read
Navigating Ethics in Hospice Care
When hospice patients have no family or stable home, care gets complex. This blog explores how teams can respond with compassion, ethics, and creativity.
July 31, 2025 · 2 min read
Caregivers Are the Backbone of Healthcare — It’s Time We Treated Them That Way
When we talk about healthcare, we usually focus on doctors, nurses, agencies — more broadly, on healthcare providers and clinicians. But there’s another group quietly holding up the entire system — caregivers. These are the family members, friends, and neighbors who step in when someone is ser
May 11, 2025 · 3 min read
Can AI Help Doctors Make Better—and Fairer—Decisions?
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to push into new corners of healthcare, offering tools that promise faster, smarter, and sometimes more equitable decisions. An emerging technology gaining attention is the use of AI to estimate a person’s biological age based on facial features. But as with ma
May 11, 2025 · 3 min read
The Last Ecstatic Days — Dying with Dignity and Presence
When we talk about death in our culture, we often do so quietly, hesitantly, or not at all. But The Last Ecstatic Days, a deeply moving documentary by Ethan Sisser, invites us to do something radically different: to look death in the eye—with clarity, compassion, and even celebration. Ethan was just
May 11, 2025 · 2 min read
The $15 Dilemma: How Rising Wages are Putting Unprecedented Pressure on Senior Living
The Cost of Care: How Senior Living Is Reinventing Itself Under Wage Pressure Rising wages, workforce shortages, and aging demographics are pushing the senior living industry toward a crossroads. Labor costs already make up over 60% of expenses—and state mandates like California’s $25/hr minimum wag
April 6, 2025 · 1 min read
Legal Risks of Retaliation: How to Handle Employee Complaints Safely
When an employee brings forward a compliance concern, they’re engaging in what the law defines as protected activity. This might involve reporting a potential violation of hospice regulations, concerns about Medicare fraud, or even raising issues about unsafe working conditions. These are rights gua
December 10, 2024 · 3 min read
Did Your Risk of Future CAP Overage Letters Increase?
Reopening of prior year CAP calculations is always difficult to manage and is one of the dreaded letters that you may receive any year. It's difficult enough to manage CAP during a given CAP year, but you also need to efficiently estimate CAP for patients who move between hospice providers so that y
December 8, 2024 · 1 min read
Navigating the Highs and Lows: Marijuana Use in Hospice Care
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring alternative therapies for patients in hospice care, and one such option that has gained attention is the use of marijuana. This controversial topic raises important questions about the potential risks and benefits associated with integr
March 24, 2024 · 3 min read
Could hospice be a hopeful word
Outside my office door right now, a group is meeting and discussing what they miss about their loved ones. There is a reality that everyone dies and that everyone who has ever loved will grieve. So if that is the inevitable, how is hospice shifting the way we treat the dying days? The mere mention
March 23, 2024 · 2 min read
End-of-Life Pain Management
One of the greatest fears people face at the end of life is pain. Sadly, many individuals with serious illness still experience unnecessary suffering because pain is not fully recognized, effectively treated, or clearly communicated to the care team. Pain affects more than just the body. It impacts
February 25, 2024 · 4 min read
