HCN News & Notes

Spectrum Home Health & Hospice Care Named to ‘Elite List’ 

LONGMEADOW — JGS Lifecare, a not-for-profit healthcare system serving seniors and their families in Western Mass. for more than 110 years, announced that Spectrum Home Health & Hospice Care, one of its subsidiary organizations, has made the 2022 Hospice Honors Elite list. 

Hospice Honors is a prestigious annual national program from HEALTHCAREfirst that recognized hospices that continuously provide the highest level of quality care as measured from the caregiver’s point of view. HEALTHCAREfirst is a leading provider of billing and coding services, CAHPS surveys, and advanced analytics. It acknowledges the highest performing agencies by analyzing the performance of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) hospice survey satisfaction measures.  

“Hospice Honors Elite recipients are industry leaders in providing quality care and constantly seeking ways to improve,” said Ronda Howard, vice president of Revenue Cycle and CAHPS at HEALTHCAREfirst. “Last year was especially challenging for healthcare which makes this accomplishment even more impressive. We are honored to be aligned with such high performing agencies like Spectrum Home Health & Hospice Care and we congratulate them.”  

Award criteria were based on Hospice CAHPS survey results for an evaluation period of October 2020 through September 2021. 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 24 evaluated questions. HEALTHCAREfirst holds a special recognition, Hospice Honors Elite, to honor hospices scoring above the HEALTHCAREfirst National Performance Score on all 24 of the evaluated questions.   

 “This Hospice Honors Elite award is given to hospices that score above the HEALTHCAREfirst National Performance Score on 100% (all 24) of the evaluated questions;  Spectrum Hospice accomplished this,” said Madeline Presz, executive director of Ruth’s House Assisted Living Residence and former executive director of Spectrum Home Health & Hospice Care. “This award absolutely reflects the hard work, dedication and outstanding performance of the entire staff at Spectrum. What an honor this is to receive.”