NHPCO Facts and Figures: Hospice Care in America provides an annual overview of hospice care delivery. This overview provides specific information on: ■ Hospice patient characteristics ■ Location and level of care ■ Medicare hospice spending ■ Hospice provider characteristics ■ Volunteer and bereavement services In order to ensure this annual report is as accurate and useful as possible to the field, NHPCO's research team is using a new methodology for creating the report and CMS data is the primary data source, specifically, CMS hospice claims data included in the hospice standard analytical file Limited Data Set. The Hospice Cost Reports, also available from CMS, provided supplemental information. The NHPCO National Data Set is the data source for the Volunteer and Bereavement statistics. The MedPAC March 2017 Report to Congress is the data source for discharges and transfers. This is a significant change from the methodology used in previous editions of NHPCO's facts and figures report. NHPCO's research team is using a new methodology for creating the report and CMS data is the primary data source... The new report is officially the "2016 Edition" that contains 2015 data. Early next year, NHPCO will release the "2017 Edition" that will reflect 2016 data. What follows are representative statistics and graphs from the report. WHO RECEIVES HOSPICE CARE How many Medicare beneficiaries received hospice care in 2015? 1,381,182 Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in hospice care for one day or more in 2015. This includes patients who: ■ Died while enrolled in hospice ■ Were enrolled in hospice in 2014 and continued to receive care in 2015 ■ Left hospice care alive during 2015 (live discharges) Winter 2017 | NHPCO NewsLine 15https://www.nhpco.org/sites/default/files/public/Statistics_Research/2016_Facts_Figures.pdf