When you are looking for a good mechanic or excellent restaurant, chances are you will first turn to friends and family for their recommendations. You might also go online to check out reviews on Yelp or Google; but since you do not know the people submitting those reviews personally, it may be hard to determine how much you can trust them. IN the age of the internet, the new warning is do not believe everything you read on the internet! Unfortunately, despite the enormous amount of information readily available at the click of a button, sorting through all that information to find high quality health care providers is a bit like searching for a needle in a huge haystack.

Here are three simple strategies to help you navigate our way through the healthcare haystack when you need to find high quality healthcare information or providers. The first strategy is to always remember to believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts. Simply put, you can place more confidence in reviews you receive from friends and family members that those from anonymous online reviewers. The second strategy is to consider the reliability of the source, whether that be an email, web site or an online review. Once you have found a reliable source, the third strategy is to carefully review and compare overall quality ratings and patient satisfaction surveys. Ideally, you are looking for facilities and providers that score well in both the quality of care and patient/family satisfaction with care categories. One such excellent resource for reliable information about various types of Medicare healthcare providers can be found at the official Medicare Compare Website https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/. From that website, you can search for various types of Medicare providers in your area by entering a zip code and then selecting between various provider types including Hospitals, Skilled Nursing Faculties, Home Health Agencies and Hospice Providers. The site will then show you how many providers are in your service area and you can use the "compare" feature to select several different providers and compare them side by side. For most categories providers, you will see both an overall quality rating and some form of a patient-satisfaction survey rating.

For example, if you log into Medicare Care Compare and search for "Hospice care" in Murrieta, you will find that there are over 120 different hospice programs listed. Of those Hospice Providers, 109 are "for-profit" and the majority of 120 agencies listed are headquartered outside of our service area with some as far away as West Hollywood California. Having this information is important in selecting a hospice provider, as you do not want to wait for several hours for help to arrive from a faraway office when you call. You will also discover that many of the hospice programs listed have very limited or not information posted about the family and caregiver experience, which makes it very difficult for you to compare them to other providers. Well-established local, non-profit hospice programs such as Hospice of the Valleys provide both quality and family satisfaction information for you to review. Hospice of the Valleys has been serving our area for over 40 years and we are quite proud of our 99.1% Quality of Patient Care rating and grateful that 93% of the families we server would definitely recommend Hospice of the Valleys to others.

In addition to the above information, there are additional helpful resources available on the Medicare Care Compare website including the following hospice specific information below. I hope you find this information helpful the next time you find yourself searching for a needle in a haystack.