Documenting the impact of hospice.

Hospice care has had an impact at many levels--on individual patients and families, on the health care industry, and on society. However, no comprehensive body of evidence has been generated that documents the impact of hospice care in terms that are meaningful to competitors, referral sources, and consumers. In part, this is because of the many challenges for evaluating hospice care. This paper describes recent efforts in the documentation of the value of hospice which have focused on outcomes measurement by individual providers rather than on large scale studies. Several groups are working to develop reliable measurement tools, to support standardized measurement in large numbers of hospices, and to collect information for benchmarking and comparison. Measurement of the impact of hospice care will set standards for other providers of end-of-life care and will document the expertise and knowledge of hospice professionals. Once established as centers of excellence in care of the dying, hospices will be well positioned for whatever delivery models may evolve for end-of-life care.