Resource guide
Hospice Operational Efficiency Hub
A hospice nurse's day should be spent with patients and families, not on hold with a pharmacy or re-entering the same medication order into a second system. Every minute lost to disconnected workflows is a minute that doesn't go to care, and in an industry already stretched thin, that math matters. This hub brings together what actually moves the needle on hospice operational efficiency: where time gets lost, what to fix first, and how to build toward it deliberately instead of reactively.
The efficiency problem hospices actually face
Quick answer: Hospice operational inefficiency isn't a motivation problem. It's a systems problem, showing up as nursing burnout, disconnected technology, and workflows that don't hold up as organizations grow or acquire new locations.
The scale of the burnout problem is significant: research suggests up to 60% of hospice nurses experience high emotional exhaustion, and 62% of palliative care clinicians report burnout, the highest of any care setting (KLAS Arch Collaborative, Burnout 2024; PMC, Behind the Care, 2025). At the same time, the industry is consolidating fast. Between 2015 and 2022, 124 hospices were acquired by 47 private equity firms, and Mertz Taggart tracked 16 hospice M&A transactions in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, nearly triple the prior quarter (Health Affairs/PMC, Aldridge et al. 2024; Hospice News, Dec 2025).
Put those two things together and the picture is clear: hospice teams are being asked to do more, across more locations, with a workforce already under real strain. Efficiency isn't a nice-to-have in that environment. It's what determines whether growth is sustainable.
Building a technology roadmap instead of a patchwork
Quick answer: Most hospices make technology decisions reactively, solving one problem at a time, which creates a patchwork of disconnected systems that require manual reconciliation. A roadmap sequences investment deliberately instead.
Our post Building a Hospice Technology Roadmap That Actually Scales lays out four questions worth asking before your next technology purchase:
- How many systems does a single medication order have to pass through?
- Do new locations inherit standardized workflows, or does every site rebuild its own?
- Is cost visibility real-time, or delayed until month-end?
- Were your current systems purpose-built for hospice, or adapted from something else?
The recommended sequence starts with connected medication ordering and EMR integration to establish a reliable data foundation, then builds real-time cost visibility and formulary controls on top of it, and only standardizes across multiple locations once the underlying workflows are consistent. Treat the roadmap as a living document with an explicit owner, not a one-time plan.
The highest-ROI investments to fund first
Quick answer: CEOs and CFOs get the most return from three categories: connected medication ordering, real-time cost visibility at the point of order, and a standardized platform that scales without adding complexity.
Our post Highest ROI Hospice Technology Investments: What CEOs and CFOs Should Fund First frames the evaluation around a simple set of questions: does the investment reduce nurse administrative burden, does it provide cost visibility at the moment decisions are made, will it standardize operations as you add locations, and is the return quantifiable in hours or dollars? The strongest investments tend to answer yes to more than one of these at once, rather than solving a single narrow problem.
Closing the same-day medication gap
Quick answer: High-performing hospices work to close the gap between a new order and a delivered medication on the same day, and the difference usually comes down to connected workflows rather than a faster courier.
Same-day fulfillment is one of the clearest, most patient-facing measures of operational efficiency in hospice. Our post How High-Performing Hospices Close Same-Day Medication Gaps looks at what separates organizations that consistently hit same-day delivery from those that don't.
Where waste hides in hospice medication management
Quick answer: Operational waste in hospice usually hides in manual reconciliation, duplicate data entry, and ordering patterns nobody is actively monitoring, not in any single obvious failure.
Our post Where Hospice Medication Waste Comes From and The Hidden Costs of Manual Medication Management in Hospice both point to the same underlying issue: when nobody has real-time visibility into ordering and utilization, waste accumulates quietly until a monthly report reveals it, well after the fact.
EMR integration, done right
Quick answer: Good EMR integration reduces duplicate data entry and keeps clinicians, pharmacies, and prescribers working from one source of truth, though the exact syncing behavior and directionality varies by which EMR platform a hospice uses.
BetterRX builds its EMR integrations in-house and maintains them in partnership with each EMR platform. Because we build the integration ourselves, our clients work directly with the team that knows the system, though some issues do originate on the EMR side and get resolved together with that partner. Sync timing and directionality vary by platform, so we point hospices to the specific documentation for their EMR rather than a single blanket figure. Our posts Prescribe and view medications anywhere with BetterRX's technology and this EMR integration and cost optimization case study show what that looks like in practice for a real hospice.
Measuring efficiency: time and nurse satisfaction
Quick answer: The clearest efficiency signals in hospice are hours saved per nurse per week and nurse satisfaction scores, both of which respond directly to how connected your medication ordering workflow is.
BetterRX customers save 5–6 hours per nurse per week (BetterRX’s 2026 Voice of the Customer survey). Over six years of client feedback, 97% report measurable time savings, with 15% saving 7 or more hours per week (BetterRX’s Voice of the Customer survey across six consecutive years). Ordering a new medication through BetterRX takes nurses an average of 1 minute 35 seconds, and refills average 45 seconds (Amplitude product analytics). On the satisfaction side, 98% of hospice nurses say BetterRX has improved their job satisfaction, and calls to support are answered in about 7 seconds on average (BetterRX’s 2026 Voice of the Customer survey).
Those numbers matter because they're leading indicators, not lagging ones. A hospice that improves ordering speed and support response time this quarter can reduce administrative burden on nurses in the quarters that follow.
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