School of Medicine

Although Medicare funded hospice care is available to qualified patients in the last 6 months of life, the median time of hospice use is 17 days (MedPAC 2011). We hypothesized that underutilization of hospice can in part be explained by physicians’ inadequate knowledge of the criteria for hospice eligibility as established by Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). A brief questionnaire was used to assess physicians’ knowledge of such non‐cancer diagnoses as dementia, heart, pulmonary and renal disease, stroke, as these are the largest percentage of hospice admissions (NHPCO 2010).