Hospice 2023
Vendor Progress in Enhancing Clinician Usability

Hospice organizations rarely feel like their vendor truly understands hospice-specific workflows, impacting both how clinicians operate in the system and how billing works. Across vendors, customers want more hospice-specific functionality. Netsmart and Homecare Homebase customers report little engagement from vendor leadership around hospice; this results in needed functionality not being prioritized, while maintenance updates also fall below client expectations. Interviewed Netsmart customers highlight missing third-party integrations (e.g., wound care, referral management, at-home monitoring devices), which hinders collaboration among interdisciplinary care teams. Homecare Homebase customers want more developments outside of just regulatory needs. While they also want further enhancements, WellSky Hospice & Palliative (Consolo) users appreciate that the system was built specifically for hospice and better aligns with their needs, unlike others in the market that organizations describe as built primarily for home health.

MatrixCare Drives Value through Improved Clinician Workflows, Epic through Enterprise Contracts

Most hospice organizations have grown even more financially strained since COVID-19 and the resulting wage pressure, increasing expectations for vendors to deliver more value for the cost, often in the form of needed functionality. Hospice providers tend to rate their solution lower for money’s worth (compared to other types of HIT software). Homecare Homebase, while lower scoring for money’s worth, still retains a strong position in the market since many large independent agencies feel there are no other viable options for their organization’s size and very large average daily census numbers. WellSky Hospice (Kinnser) and Netsmart customers decreasingly feel their vendor delivers good value or plan to stay with their vendor. Reporting a higher sense of value, MatrixCare customers cite improvements to clinician workflows, though they also want to see fewer ad hoc costs for additional modules. Users of WellSky Hospice & Palliative feel the functionality (clinical and revenue cycle) helps make them more efficient. Epic’s health system–owned customers point to the integration with the rest of the enterprise Epic platform. On the other hand, hospice end users report more issues with clinical workflows (related to use of the remote client), and they rate the vendor lower for money’s worth.

WellSky Shows Transitions of Care Success with New Referral Management Tool; Netsmart Fails to Deliver Third-Party Interfaces for Transitions

As detailed in KLAS’ recent Transitions of Care report, fax remains the primary transfer tool for patients moving to hospice care. The development of referral management tools, while helpful, has yet to improve efficiency for most organizations, and many interoperability challenges remain. WellSky’s new referral management tool (available in the Hospice & Palliative solution) appears to be breaking this trend, helping initial adopters better tackle patient transitions. Netsmart customers are frustrated over the lack of bidirectional interfacing for data exchange as well as the cost of interfaces. Epic customers highlight the product’s strong data exchange when sending acute care patients to hospice; however, transitions with non-Epic facilities lack this level of integration and collaboration. Some MatrixCare customers don’t use the vendor’s referral platform because it costs extra, but those who do say data transitions easily between MatrixCare modules. Most Homecare Homebase respondents feel third-party data is easy to access when it comes from approved vendor partners. Several customers note difficulties transitioning from home health to hospice and mention that medication data doesn’t always cross over correctly.

Some respondents choose not to answer particular questions, meaning the sample size for any given vendor or solution can change from question to question. When the number of unique organization responses for a particular question is less than 15, the score for that question is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. Note that when a vendor has a low number of reporting sites, the possibility exists for KLAS scores to change significantly as new surveys are collected.