Health MR

Hospice Inpatient Beds: A Potential Growth Opportunity for Your Hospice

Hospice inpatient beds at hospitals or in a dedicated facility in your service area may provide significant opportunity for growth for your hospice. In this article, we discuss how to project the need for hospice inpatient beds using internal hospital data, as well as provide a free download to help you quickly and easily perform the calculation.

The Benefits of Hospice Inpatient Beds
The benefits of adding dedicated hospice inpatient beds and/or a hospice inpatient unit for terminally ill patients are manifold. In addition to improving the quality of patient care, inpatient hospice can also:

• Reduce length of stays for patients who die in the hospital
• Free up more costly intensive care unit beds which helps to improve patient flow and reduce direct care expenses
• Create an additional revenue stream for hospitals
• Reduce hospital mortality rates if the patient dies in hospice
• Fill an important community end-of-life care need in a better and more economical way.

Calculating Potential Hospice Inpatient Days from Hospital Referrals
The following table demonstrates how you can use hospital-specific data to calculate potential hospice inpatient days.

Key Data for Hospital A:

• Column A lists each DRG measured.
• Column B shows the number of deaths with lengths of stay of greater than three days for each DRG.
• Column C shows the actual length of stay (ALOS) for patients who exceed the three-day threshold.
• Column D shows the target length of stay for the DRG as set by Medicare.
• Column E is the difference between the actual DRG ALOS and the target DRG LOS. (Only those over target are shown.)
  Column E = Column C – Column D
• Column F shows the number of days that patients could be transferred to hospice and is determined by multiplying the number of deaths (Column B) by the difference in actual ALOS and target ALOS (Column E).
  Column F = Column B x Column E
• Column F summed shows the potential number of hospice inpatient days based on internal hospital referrals.

In this example, the time period is 12 months; thus, there is a potential to "save" 740 days or a hospice average daily census of 2.0 (740 days/365 days per year). Keep in mind that there may be other admissions from patients on hospice service at home who also meet the inpatient criteria.

Is Inpatient Hospice a Potential Opportunity for Growth in Your Service Area?
To help you answer this question, Healthcare Market Resources can provide you with the data necessary to perform the analysis for any acute care facility in the United States for its Medicare population. Click here for a free download of this report, as well as a worksheet that will help you calculate a hospital’s need for inpatient hospice beds. Once you’ve done the calculation for a key referral hospital, you can approach proactively with this wonderful opportunity to create a "win-win-win" situation.

Inpatient hospice is just one example of the many potential growth opportunities available to hospice providers today. Click here or give us a call at 215-657-7373 for more information about how Healthcare Market Resources’ in-depth, local market data – Hospice Industry Reports and Home Health Industry Reports – can be used to help you find and create new growth opportunities for your agency.

Readers Speak Out: "Additional Considerations for Projecting Hospice Inpatient Beds"
One of our readers – Bill Musick, a hospice consultant in Hawaii – found this feature article very useful. But he wanted to alert our readers that the projections developed using this tool presented an ideal case and that other factors could limit this projection. Click here to read what Bill had to say.

We appreciate Bill’s comments and welcome input from our readers. Share your comments with us today.