CMS Releases New Data on Medicare Hospice Utilization and Payment

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has released a new public data set on Medicare hospice utilization and payment. The Hospice Utilization and Payment Public Use File (Hospice PUF) is a comprehensive resource for information on hospice utilization, payments, submitted charges, diagnoses, and beneficiary demographics organized by hospice provider and state. With this data, it is now possible to analyze geographic variation in the delivery of hospice care, as well as variation across individual hospice providers.  The Hospice PUF also includes a number of metrics on hospice beneficiary demographics and sites of service to facilitate analyses of differences in the patient population across providers.  The public data set includes information on 4,025 hospice providers, over 1.3 million hospice beneficiaries, and over $15 billion in Medicare payments for 2014.

Read more: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Medicare-Provider-Charge-Data/Hospice.html