The Hospice Provider data CSV and the CAHPS Hospice survey CSV, both from data.cms.gov. The Provider CSV carries ownership, HCI indicators, and HVLDL; the CAHPS CSV carries the eight family caregiver survey measures plus rating and recommendation. SleekRank joins them on the six-digit CCN.

CMS refreshes Hospice Compare on a roughly quarterly schedule, with the Hospice Care Index recalculated annually based on Medicare claims. Setting cache_duration to 86400 seconds gives daily re-fetch so out-of-cycle corrections flow through promptly rather than persisting through the entire quarter.

{ccn}-{hospice-name-slug} is the most readable. CCN guarantees stability across the consolidations and rebrands common in the hospice industry. The name suffix makes the URL meaningful in SERP. For multi-location chains, include the city in the suffix to avoid collisions between locations of the same chain.

Yes. The HCI publishes ten indicators including HVLDL, nurse visit minutes per RHC day, social work minutes, late-discharge rates, burdensome transitions type 1 and 2, gaps in skilled nursing visits, no skilled nursing visit, and patients receiving GIP or CHC.

CMS suppresses CAHPS scores when fewer than 30 family responses are available in the eight-quarter window. Use a Twig conditional in the template to suppress the family-experience badge for those rows and render a "new" or "low volume" tag instead. Do not display a fabricated default score.

When CMS removes a CCN from the Provider file, the SleekRank row disappears on the next refresh and the URL returns 404 cleanly. The sitemap regenerates automatically without it. If you want to preserve search equity, add a wildcard redirect rule to the parent service-area page before the row is dropped.

CMS reports CAHPS Hospice as star ratings on the Care Compare consumer site and as raw percentages in the published CSV. SleekRank can render either; most teams use the percentage in the table and translate the overall rating into a 1-5 star badge using the same thresholds CMS uses internally for the consumer view.

Yes. ownership_type comes through as non-profit, for-profit, government, or other. Run a SleekRank page group at /hospice/non-profit/{slug}/ for the non-profit subset, or render ownership as a filterable tag on the main archive that links into each CCN page in the directory.