Approximately 1.7 million Medicare beneficiaries use hospice care annually, with services primarily delivered through in-person visits from an interdisciplinary team consisting of nurses, social workers, home health aides, and other professionals. Despite the centrality of these visits to hospice care, limited evidence on visit patterns hinders efforts to establish or evaluate benchmark visit standards, quality measures, care delivery practices, and workforce planning.

This article addresses this gap by examining visit patterns among Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and older enrolled in hospice.