Vitas Healthcare Corporation Of California
9655 Granite Ridge Drive, Suite 300, San Diego, CA 92123 · Medicare-certified hospice
📞 Call this hospice — (858) 499-8901
This star comes only from bereaved families who returned a survey — it measures communication and support, not clinical quality, and it lags by a year or more. CMS does not publish the number of completed surveys here, so a smaller hospice’s star can rest on a thin sample. Treat it as one signal, not a verdict.
This hospice cared for an average of 609 patients a day. 55% of its care was delivered in a private home. Its Hospice Care Index score is 10 out of 10, against 8.8 nationally. 81% of surveyed families said they would definitely recommend it.
What families said (CAHPS Hospice survey)
| Measure | Percent of families | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Rated the hospice 9 or 10 out of 10 | 78% | ||
| Would definitely recommend it | 81% | ||
| The team always treated the patient with respect | 88% | ||
| The patient always got the help they needed for pain and symptoms | 74% | ||
| The team always communicated well | 76% | ||
| The team always provided timely help | 67% | ||
| The team gave the right amount of emotional and spiritual support | 91% | ||
| Rated the hospice 6 or lower | 7% | ||
| Would probably or definitely not recommend it | 6% |
Asked of bereaved family caregivers several months after the death. The last rows are the least favourable answers — shown because a page that prints only the good ones is an advertisement.
The seven care processes
| Measure | This hospice | National | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treatment preferences documented 2,792 patients | 99.28% | 99.8% | about the same |
| Beliefs and values addressed, when the patient wanted that 2,792 patients | 99.18% | 99.27% | about the same |
| Screened for pain 2,792 patients | 97.28% | 99% | about the same |
| Given a full pain assessment 1,534 patients | 99.22% | 98.27% | about the same |
| Screened for shortness of breath 2,792 patients | 97.46% | 99.53% | about the same |
| Treated for shortness of breath 1,742 patients | 99.89% | 98.59% | about the same |
| Given a bowel regimen with an opioid 1,123 patients | 99.47% | 98.46% | about the same |
| Received all seven care processes 2,792 patients | 95.99% | 96.15% | about the same |
Medicare checks seven things every hospice should do when a patient is admitted. Nearly every hospice scores in the nineties, so a few points below the national figure is a real gap rather than a rounding difference. “Better” and “worse” here mean this provider differs from the national figure by more than 10% of it and by more than half a percentage point; anything closer reads “about the same”. That second test matters on the rare-event rows — a national rate of 0.2% would otherwise make almost any provider look remarkable. CMS does not publish a significance test for these measures, so where fewer than 100 patients sit behind a rate — or where the national rate is low enough that a handful of events would swing it — we print both numbers and decline to grade, rather than call a named provider worse than average on the strength of three patients.
Hospice Care Index
| Indicator | This hospice | Percentile | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Continuous or inpatient care provided % of days | 1.8% | 93th percentile | |
| Gaps in nursing visits % of elections | 77.1% | 83th percentile | |
| Early live discharges % of live discharges | 14.6% | 91th percentile | |
| Late live discharges % of live discharges | 33% | 39th percentile | |
| Burdensome transitions, type 1 % of live discharges | 12.7% | 76th percentile | |
| Burdensome transitions, type 2 % of live discharges | 3% | 75th percentile | |
| Per-patient Medicare spending $ | $22,222 | 71th percentile | |
| Nurse minutes per routine home-care day min | 18.3 min | 91th percentile | |
| Skilled-nursing minutes on weekends % of minutes | 11.1% | 76th percentile | |
| Visits near death % of decedents | 97.6% | 83th percentile |
The Care Index is ten separate checks on how a hospice actually operates — whether nurses visit near the end, whether patients are discharged alive unusually often, how much care is delivered at weekends. The score is how many of the ten it passes. The percentile says where this hospice sits among all hospices on that row, and for rows where a lower number is better a low percentile is the good end.
Who this hospice cared for, and where
Main condition of the patients it served
| Condition | Percent of patients | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cancer | 20% | ||
| Dementia | 8% | ||
| Circulatory or heart disease | 14% | ||
| Respiratory disease | 7% | ||
| Stroke | 36% | ||
| Other conditions | 16% |
Where its care was delivered
| Setting | Percent of care | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| In a private home | 55% | ||
| In an assisted-living community | 36% | ||
| In a nursing facility | 8% | ||
| In a hospital | 1% |
Visits in the last days of life: 58.5% (national: 48.3%) — how often a nurse or social worker visited in the final three days.
About this hospice
Ownership: For-Profit
Medicare-certified since: 11/13/1992
Other Medicare-certified hospices in San Diego
- Silverado Hospice San Diego San Diego, CA 4 of 5
- Apreva Hospice San Diego, CA 3 of 5
- Comfort And Peace Hospice San Diego, CA 3 of 5
- Kaiser Foundation Hospital San Diego Hospice San Diego, CA 3 of 5
- Lightbridge Hospice San Diego, CA 3 of 5
- Mission Hospice Services Of San Diego LLC San Diego, CA 3 of 5
- Seaport Hospice San Diego, CA 3 of 5
- Sharp Hospicecare San Diego, CA 3 of 5
Families are usually choosing between several hospices, not evaluating one. Each link opens the same record for that hospice. See all hospices in California.
What this rating measures
This star reflects the family caregiver survey (CAHPS Hospice) — how families rate the hospice’s communication, timeliness, help with symptoms, and emotional support. Learn more in our guides to hospice vs. palliative care and hospice and end-of-life care — the second explains the four levels of care Medicare covers (including continuous home care during a crisis and inpatient care), which families are routinely never told about.
Full quality record
The complete, current CMS record for this provider — every quality measure and patient-experience result — lives on Medicare’s official Care Compare tool. We link straight to it rather than repackaging a stale copy.
View Vitas Healthcare Corporation Of California on Medicare Care Compare ↗
Certification, contact details, and star rating from the CMS Care Compare dataset (public domain), retrieved 2026-07-17. Quality measures from the CMS hospice public reporting file, August 2026 release. Care Compare is the authoritative source for the full quality record and for the provider’s current phone number.