If you have heard staff mention HOPE and were not sure whether it was a new form, a new system, or a new rule, you are not alone. HOPE stands for Hospice Outcomes and Patient Evaluation, and it is the assessment tool that replaced the older Hospice Item Set, known as HIS. It became mandatory for hospice clinicians to begin collecting on October 1, 2025, and it is already affecting how your team spends its time and how your hospice gets paid.
HOPE is completed by hospice clinicians at defined points during a patient's stay: at admission, at up to two HOPE Update Visits during roughly the first 30 days, and again at discharge, which includes when a patient dies. The data collected feeds the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, the same public reporting system that eventually shapes what families and referral sources see about a hospice's quality.
The completed assessment gets submitted electronically through iQIES, the CMS technical platform that also receives home health's OASIS data and nursing home MDS data. Think of HOPE as the form and iQIES as the system you file it through, the same way a tax form and the e-filing portal that receives it are two separate things.
Hospices that miss HOPE reporting requirements lose 4 percent of their Medicare payments for the entire year. That is not a small line item. On a hospice serving 80 patients at an average per-patient cost of $35,000, a 4 percent penalty works out to more than $110,000 gone, money that does not come back once the reporting year closes.
CMS has also signaled that HOPE data may eventually inform hospice payment refinements directly, not just quality reporting, which would echo how home health's OASIS assessment already determines a meaningful share of that industry's payment. Whether or not that happens on a specific timeline, the direction is clear: HOPE is not a temporary compliance exercise. It is the new baseline.
Completing HOPE assessments accurately takes clinician time, and that time has to come from somewhere. For many hospices, it comes out of the same hours nurses currently spend chasing equipment vendors: figuring out which supplier covers a ZIP code, calling multiple numbers to confirm a delivery, following up on equipment that never got picked up after a patient's death.
This is where HOPE compliance and equipment management intersect more directly than most hospice leaders expect. A hospice that consolidates its DME vendor relationships and gets clean, real-time visibility into orders and deliveries is not just solving an equipment problem. It is freeing clinical staff time that can go directly into completing HOPE assessments accurately and on schedule, instead of being split between two competing demands.
If your team is currently stretched between HOPE documentation and equipment follow-up, equipment follow-up is usually the easier problem to solve first, because it does not require new clinical training or a new assessment tool. It requires accountability from whoever is managing your DME relationships. Fixing that piece first tends to create the breathing room your clinical team needs to handle HOPE well, rather than treating both as separate fires competing for the same hours.
Start by asking your clinical team a direct question: in a typical week, how much time goes to equipment coordination versus documentation? If the answer surprises you, that is a signal worth acting on before the next reporting period closes.
Qualis takes equipment coordination off your clinical team's plate entirely. Instead of a nurse calling multiple vendors to track down a delivery, orders go through one EMR-integrated portal, route automatically to an accountable vendor in Qualis's managed network, and get tracked to the door without a phone call. That is real time back for HOPE assessments, family communication, and direct patient care, not just a promise of efficiency on a sales sheet.
Qualis, now part of the LivTech family of in-home care solutions, also handles vendor escalation and consolidated invoicing, so equipment problems stop landing on your clinicians' desks in the first place. The time your team gets back is the same time HOPE compliance is now asking for, which makes equipment management one of the more direct levers a hospice has for protecting both its documentation and its payment.
Learn how Qualis can help your team make room for HOPE compliance.