Caregivers: Understanding Burnout and Promoting Resilience
Caregivers play a critical role in hospice care, where the focus is on providing comfort and support to individuals nearing the end of life. These unsung heroes, often family members or close friends, offer physical, emotional, and spiritual support to their loved...
Anticipatory Grief: Coping with Loss Before It Happens
Anticipatory grief, also referred to as anticipatory loss or preparatory loss, is a unique form of mourning that occurs before the actual loss takes place. It is the feeling of loss that is felt before the loss happens. While traditional grief typically follows a...
What is grief?
Grief is the emotional, psychological, and physical response to loss. It is a natural process that helps individuals come to terms with the reality of their loss and adjust to life without the person or thing they've lost. Whether it's the death of a loved one, the...
What is a False Claims Act investigation?
What is the False Claims Act
What is the hospice governing body?
What is the governing body? In accordance with the Conditions of Participation, a Medicare certified hospice agency must have a governing body. The governing body has ultimate responsibility for the hospice agency, including legal and financial authority. Medicare...
What is the Hospice Quality Reporting Program (HQRP)?
What is the purpose of hospice quality reporting? The Affordable Care Act authorized the establishment of a Quality Reporting Program for hospices. The Hospice Quality Reporting Program (HQRP) was established in 2014. HQRP aims to ensure that the level of...
What is Hospice Item Set (HIS)?
All Medicare certified hospice agencies must submit an HIS Admission and HIS Discharge record on all admissions and discharges from their agency. The report must include all patients, irrespective of payer source, patient age, or location where hospice services were...
What is the CAHPS survey?
The CAHPS survey is intended to measure the experience of patients who had died while receiving hospice care and the experience of their primary caregivers. It surveys informal caregivers – usually family members – of the persons who died under hospice care. The...
What is a hospice PEPPER report?
Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Reports (PEPPER) is a data analysis report that has been available for hospices since 2012. This report contains claims data statistics based upon UB-04 claims data submissions for a single hospice agency. The...
Understanding the PEPPER Report
The PEPPER report target areas focus on statistics that will identify potential for improper Medicare billing. Comparison to national, jurisdictional, and state percentiles can highlight a hospice agency’s potential need for change to its practices to guard against...