Coastal Hospice has again been named a 2021 Hospice Honors recipient, a program that recognizes hospices providing the highest level of quality as measured from the caregiver’s point of view.

The award is given by HEALTHCAREfirst, a leading provider of Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems surveys, advanced analytics and billing and coding services.

“Hospice Honors recipients are industry leaders in providing quality care and constantly seeking ways to improve,” Ronda Howard, vice president of revenue cycle and CAHPS at HEALTHCAREfirst, said in a prepared statement. “We are honored to be aligned with high performing agencies such as Coastal Hospice and we congratulate them on their success.”

Award criteria is based on Hospice CAHPS survey results for an evaluation period of October 2019 through September 2020. Award recipients were identified by evaluating performance on a set of 24 quality indicator measures. Performance scores were aggregated from all completed surveys and were compared on a question-by-question basis to a National Performance Score calculated from all hospices contained in the HEALTHCAREfirst’s Hospice CAHPS database. Hospice Honors recipients include those hospices scoring above the HEALTHCAREfirst National Performance Score on 20 of the evaluated questions.

“These results are greatly important because they represent feedback directly from our patients and their families,” said Monica Escalante, CEO of Coastal Hospice. “Equally important, they are delivered by an unbiased third party, HEALTHCAREfirst, which helps us obtain a clearer picture of where we are succeeding and where we can improve. We are very proud of the entire Coastal Hospice team which made this possible.”

Escalante points out two of many ways that reports from HEALTHCAREfirst have helped Coastal Hospice maintain its high quality of service.

“This feedback allowed us to bolster our caregiver education program, which has been especially important during the pandemic,” she said. “Another impact was seeing ways to further streamline our internal workflow to maximize the amount of time we can engage with our patients. Our focus is always on continuous improvement; it’s critical for our staff, patients, caregivers and the community at large.”