If you’ve read what I’ve written before about Medicare hospice data, you already know the starting point: the directory is public, the providers are listed, and a few minutes on medicare.gov/care-compare will almost certainly turn up hospice organizations in your service area you didn’t know existed.
That’s step one. The harder question is what comes next.
Because pulling a list of 20 or 30 hospice providers in your county doesn’t tell you which one moves the most patients toward death in your service area. It doesn’t tell you which one has the shortest length of stay, and therefore the tightest referral window for families. It doesn’t tell you which one is growing, which one is shrinking, or which one a thoughtful conversation could turn into a real partnership six months from now.
The data has answers to all of that. You just have to know how to read it.
Turning the directory into a strategy
Turning Medicare hospice reports into a working partnership strategy is what we have built an entire day of training around. On August 12, 2026 in Minneapolis, I’ll be leading the first-ever Certified Hospice Relations Specialist (CHRS) Training Day as the pre-convention program for CANA’s 108th Annual Convention.
The CHRS framework moves through five steps: Understand, Identify, Connect, Collaborate, and Elevate. The Identify step is where we spend real time inside the data, and where we go beyond “here’s a list of hospices” and into:
- How to read patient census, length of stay, and location-of-death data, and what each metric tells you about referral patterns
- How to build a prioritized outreach list instead of a contact list
- What to say in the first meeting once you’ve done the homework
- How to spot the hospice partnerships that will actually matter to your business, and stop spending time on the ones that won’t
You’ll leave with a hospice outreach plan grounded in evidence, the CANA Hospice Relations Manual, your digital CHRS certificate, and up to six CE hours.
Use WITHLACY for 10% off
Registration is $595 for CANA members and $695 for non-members. Enter code WITHLACY at checkout to save 10%.
Register for CHRS Training Day →
The directory is the easy part. Come spend a day with me and learn what to do with it.
