On April 20, 2023, HHS announced that it is releasing ownership data for all Medicare-certified hospice and home health agencies not previously available to the public in this way. There are more than 6,000 hospices and 11,000 home health agencies certified to participate in the Medicare program, whose ownership information is now publicly available on the CMS website.

This data release flows from CMS’s stated desire to make the healthcare industry more transparent. According to CMS, “making ownership information transparent benefits researchers and enforcement agencies by allowing them to identify common owners that have had histories of poor performance, analyze data and trends on how market consolidation impacts consumers with increased costs without necessarily improving quality of care, and evaluate the relationships between ownership and changes in health care costs and outcomes.” In addition, CMS believes that publishing this information “benefits the public by assisting patients, and their loved ones, in making more informed decisions about care.” CMS published similar data for more than 15,000 nursing homes in September 2022, and CMS released ownership information on the 7,000 hospitals enrolled in Medicare in December 2022.

The data elements available for hospice and home health agency ownership include:

• Enrollment information such as organization name, type, practice location addresses, National Provider Identifier (NPI), and CMS Certification Number (CCN);
• Detailed information about each owner such as whether it is an organization or an individual and whether it is a direct owner or indirect owner (that is, there is at least one subsidiary between it and the provider); and
• A numerical associate ID for each owner to enable linkage to the enrollment file.

As part of this release, CMS is also publishing files that include data on mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, and changes of ownership since 2016 for hospices and home health agencies enrolled in Medicare.