Stella Maris INC
2300 Dulaney Valley Rd, Timonium, MD 21093 · Medicare-certified hospice
📞 Call this hospice — (410) 252-4500
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 116 patients a day. 96% of its care was delivered in a private home. Its Hospice Care Index score is 10 out of 10, against 8.8 nationally. 82% 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 | 81% | ||
| Would definitely recommend it | 82% | ||
| The team always treated the patient with respect | 90% | ||
| The patient always got the help they needed for pain and symptoms | 77% | ||
| The team always communicated well | 82% | ||
| The team always provided timely help | 82% | ||
| The team gave the right amount of emotional and spiritual support | 88% | ||
| Rated the hospice 6 or lower | 5% | ||
| Would probably or definitely not recommend it | 4% |
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 656 patients | 100% | 99.8% | about the same |
| Beliefs and values addressed, when the patient wanted that 656 patients | 100% | 99.27% | about the same |
| Screened for pain 656 patients | 100% | 99% | about the same |
| Given a full pain assessment 284 patients | 100% | 98.27% | about the same |
| Screened for shortness of breath 656 patients | 100% | 99.53% | about the same |
| Treated for shortness of breath 210 patients | 100% | 98.59% | about the same |
| Given a bowel regimen with an opioid 173 patients | 100% | 98.46% | about the same |
| Received all seven care processes 656 patients | 100% | 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 | 2.5% | 95th percentile | |
| Gaps in nursing visits % of elections | 56% | 55th percentile | |
| Early live discharges % of live discharges | 8.6% | 65th percentile | |
| Late live discharges % of live discharges | 41.9% | 65th percentile | |
| Burdensome transitions, type 1 % of live discharges | 4% | 33th percentile | |
| Burdensome transitions, type 2 % of live discharges | 1% | 50th percentile | |
| Per-patient Medicare spending $ | $13,927 | 28th percentile | |
| Nurse minutes per routine home-care day min | 9.8 min | 23th percentile | |
| Skilled-nursing minutes on weekends % of minutes | 7.4% | 44th percentile | |
| Visits near death % of decedents | 85.5% | 20th 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 | 30% | ||
| Dementia | 27% | ||
| Circulatory or heart disease | 12% | ||
| Respiratory disease | 5% | ||
| Stroke | 6% | ||
| Other conditions | 21% |
Where its care was delivered
| Setting | Percent of care | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| In a private home | 96% | ||
| In an inpatient hospice unit | 4% |
Visits in the last days of life: 61% (national: 48.3%) — how often a nurse or social worker visited in the final three days.
About this hospice
Ownership: Other
Medicare-certified since: 11/18/1983
Other Medicare-certified hospices in Maryland
- Compass Regional Hospice, INC Centreville, MD 5 of 5
- Hospice Of Garrett County Oakland, MD 5 of 5
- Hospice Of The Chesapeake, Inc. Pasadena, MD 2 of 5
- Hospice Of The Chesapeake, Inc. Waldorf, MD 2 of 5
- Jewish Social Service Agency Hospice Rockville, MD 2 of 5
- Luminis Health Gilchrist Life Care Institute Annapolis, MD 2 of 5
- Heartland Hospice (beltsville) Beltsville, MD 1 of 5
- Adoration Hospice Baltimore, MD
Families are usually choosing between several hospices, not evaluating one. Each link opens the same record for that hospice. See all hospices in Maryland.
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.
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.