Hospice Industry Data from NHPCO - A Look Back Five Years

As Dr. Christian Sinclair pointed out in a recent post on the  blog Pallimed, the 2010 edition of the NHPCO report  Facts and Figures:  Hospice Care in America was short of surprises when compared to data from last year's report.

So I looked back to a 2005 report to better understand how the hospice industry has changed (or not) over the past five years. Among my surprises were these:

-Impressive growth in the percentage of decedents receiving hospice care. Sure, I expected growth, but not at the rate we've seen.

-Short-stay patients (7 days or less) remained level at one-third of total deaths and discharges. Is this an intractable issue, in which case hospices should consider improving their capacity to provide exemplary care for short-stay patients, or does there remain optimism that  knowledge of more timely (earlier) referrals will spread quickly, thus reducing the percentage of short-stay patients.

-The size of hospices remained small - nearly 8 out of 10 have fewer than three admissions per week. Given the speculative talk about consolidation, I  expected that over the past five years there would have been considerably fewer hospices admitting less that 150 patients per year.

Got me to thinking. If I was considering hospice care for a family member, aware that there is a one-in-three chance that the episode of hospice care will be no longer than a week, I'd want to select a hospice that admits ten times the number of patients than the average-sized hospice. I figure that the additional volume would mean greater proficiency in short-stay care.

Does volume matter? No studies to prove either way.
What do your professional instincts tell you?