Gilchrist Wins National Award for “Going Above and Beyond in Providing Quality Care”
Gilchrist Wins National Award for “Going Above and Beyond in Providing Quality Care”
For “going above and beyond in providing quality care” for patients and their loved ones, Gilchrist has won a prestigious “Hospice Honors” award.
This award recognizes hospices nationwide that continuously provide the highest level of quality as measured from the caregiver’s point of view. In other words, the ultimate “judges” for this award are those who know hospices best: the people who have been in their care.
Award criteria are based on hospice CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) survey results. The agency that administers the awards, HEALTHCAREfirst, evaluated the performance of hospices on a set of 24 quality indicator measures.
“Hospice Honors recipients are industry leaders in providing quality care and constantly seeking ways to improve,” said Ronda Howard, HEALTHCAREfirst’s vice president of revenue cycle and CAHPS. “Last year was especially challenging for healthcare which makes this accomplishment even more impressive.”
The 2023 “Hospice Honors” award is for the evaluation period of October 2021 through September 2022.
“Of all the awards we win, this one is particularly gratifying to me given that it ultimately comes from those we care for. Their experiences with us are what truly matter. This is the single most meaningful measure of what we do. And so I am genuinely overjoyed by this recognition and profoundly grateful for every member of our Gilchrist team,” said Catherine Y. Hamel, president of Gilchrist.
HEALTHCAREfirst works with thousands of home health and hospice providers across the country to streamline and optimize their business operations.
Overseen by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the CAHPS Hospice Survey is a national survey of family members or friends who cared for a patient who died while under hospice care. Publicly reported data include the following eight measures:
- Communication with family;
- Getting timely help;
- Treating patient with respect;
- Emotional and spiritual support;
- Help for pain and symptoms;
- Training family to care for patient;
- Rating of the hospice where care was delivered; and
- Willing to recommend the hospice where care was delivered.
To be considered for this award, a hospice must have scored above the HEALTHCAREfirst National Performance Score on the Hospice CAHPS Willingness to Recommend question. After qualifying, hospices were evaluated on caregivers’ responses to 23 additional survey questions.