For-profit firms provide less in hospice care

[Sunlei]

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

[Bagsgroove]

1. Profit vs Non-Profit

I spent most of my life working in nursing homes and assisted-living care. I've worked for two for-profit corporate retirement companies, and two non-profit retirement centers. The experience is the same as what the Washington Posts reports about hospice care. The whole culture of the for-profit corporations was about minimizing costs and maximizing the bottom line. The culture of the non-profits I worked for was much more centered on quality care.