The 6 Survey Categories Your Equipment Vendor Controls

Six Questions Families Answer That Have Nothing to Do With Your Nurses

CMS does not ask a bereaved family, "How was your DME vendor?" No question on the CAHPS Hospice Survey names an equipment company directly. But six of the survey's questions ask about experiences that ride almost entirely on how equipment showed up in the home, and those six questions are where a hospice's own performance and its vendor's performance become impossible for a family to tell apart.

The Six Areas Where Equipment Performance Hides Inside Your Score

1. 
   

   Getting timely help. When a family calls because a hospital bed will not raise, or an oxygen concentrator's alarm keeps going off, the survey asks whether they got help as soon as they needed it. If the equipment vendor's after-hours line does not answer, the hospice absorbs that answer as its own.

2. Communication with the family. Families are asked whether the care team kept them informed. When a delivery is delayed and nobody calls to say so, the silence reads as poor communication from the hospice, even if the hospice's own staff never knew the delivery was late.

3. Training the family to give care at home. A big share of this question is about whether the family felt confident using the equipment they were given, whether that is a hospital bed, a lift, or a suction machine. If the equipment arrives without a clear walkthrough, or the wrong item shows up entirely, the family's confidence drops and so does this score.

4. Help with pain and symptoms. Equipment is often the tool that manages symptoms directly: a properly fitted hospital bed for positioning, an oxygen concentrator for breathlessness, a pressure-relief mattress to prevent skin breakdown. When equipment is late, wrong, or malfunctioning, symptom management suffers, and families notice.

5. Overall rating of the hospice. This is the single number families are asked to give the hospice from zero to ten. Every frustration with equipment, whether it was a late delivery or a piece of equipment left behind after the patient died and never picked up, folds into this one number.

6. Willingness to recommend. The last major survey question asks whether the family would recommend the hospice to others. This is the number that shows up most visibly to future families and referral sources, and it is also the number most sensitive to a single bad equipment experience near the end of a patient's life, when emotions are highest and memories are most durable.

Why These Six Add Up to 40 Percent of the Score

Taken together, these six areas account for roughly 40 percent of the 47 questions that build a hospice's star rating. That is not a rounding error. It means nearly half of what determines whether a hospice shows up as three stars or four stars on Medicare Care Compare is shaped by a vendor relationship most hospice leadership teams never formally measure.

This is also why two hospices with equally excellent clinical teams can post very different scores. The difference usually is not the nursing care. It is whether equipment showed up on time, worked when it arrived, and came with someone answering the phone at 11 p.m. on a Saturday.

What to Do With This List

The value of knowing these six categories is that they turn a vague, uncomfortable feeling, "our score should be higher than this," into something you can actually audit. For each category, ask your team a direct question: how many late deliveries did we have last quarter, how many after-hours calls went unanswered, how many pieces of equipment sat uncollected in an empty room for more than a week.

If you do not have clean answers to those questions today, that is itself useful information. It means the six categories most tied to your public score are currently a blind spot, not a managed metric.

A Faster Way to See Where You Stand

A free CAHPS Self-Assessment Worksheet scores your current equipment vendor across exactly these six categories and produces a simple risk score in about ten minutes. This allows you to understand Why Your Hospice Star Rating Is Lower Than You Think, and how these categories add up to your published rating.

For the full data behind the 40 percent figure, including the methodology CMS uses to weight these categories, see the CAHPS Whitepaper.

How Qualis Puts a Number on Each of These Six Categories

This is the exact problem Qualis's DME+ platform was built to solve. Instead of finding out after the fact that a delivery was late or a family never got trained on a piece of equipment, Qualis tracks delivery timelines, after-hours response, and utilization by category in real time, so a hospice can see where it stands on all six categories months before a CAHPS survey ever comes back.

Behind that software sits a managed vendor network Qualis holds accountable on the hospice's behalf. Qualis, now part of the LivTech family of in-home care solutions, does not own, rent, or sell any of the equipment it coordinates, so when a vendor underperforms on one of these six categories, Qualis has every reason to fix it and none to look away.

Learn how Qualis can help you track and improve these six categories.