Avera @ Home
901 S Dakota St, Ste 1a, Milbank, SD 57252 · Medicare-certified hospice
📞 Call this hospice — (605) 432-3259
CMS has not published a star rating for this provider yet. That usually means too few completed surveys to publish one — often a smaller or newer provider — not that quality is average or poor. It is a gap in the data, not a verdict. The full record is on Care Compare below.
This hospice cared for an average of 5 patients a day. 49% of its care was delivered in a nursing facility. Its Hospice Care Index score is 9 out of 10, against 8.8 nationally. 87% 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 | 88% | ||
| Would definitely recommend it | 87% | ||
| The team always treated the patient with respect | 93% | ||
| The patient always got the help they needed for pain and symptoms | 75% | ||
| The team always communicated well | 82% | ||
| The team always provided timely help | 83% | ||
| The team gave the right amount of emotional and spiritual support | 96% | ||
| Rated the hospice 6 or lower | 3% | ||
| Would probably or definitely not recommend it | 3% |
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 42 patients | 100% | 99.8% | too few patients to compare |
| Beliefs and values addressed, when the patient wanted that 42 patients | 100% | 99.27% | too few patients to compare |
| Screened for pain 42 patients | 100% | 99% | too few patients to compare |
| Given a full pain assessment 26 patients | 100% | 98.27% | too few patients to compare |
| Screened for shortness of breath 42 patients | 100% | 99.53% | too few patients to compare |
| Treated for shortness of breath 20 patients | 100% | 98.59% | too few patients to compare |
| Received all seven care processes 42 patients | 100% | 96.15% | too few patients to compare |
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 | 0% | 52th percentile | |
| Gaps in nursing visits % of elections | 15.4% | 8th percentile | |
| Early live discharges % of live discharges | 8.3% | 63th percentile | |
| Late live discharges % of live discharges | 16.7% | 9th percentile | |
| Burdensome transitions, type 1 % of live discharges | 8.3% | 56th percentile | |
| Burdensome transitions, type 2 % of live discharges | 0% | 45th percentile | |
| Per-patient Medicare spending $ | $7,411 | 4th percentile | |
| Nurse minutes per routine home-care day min | 15.1 min | 77th percentile | |
| Skilled-nursing minutes on weekends % of minutes | 9.6% | 67th percentile | |
| Visits near death % of decedents | 91% | 35th 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 | 31% | ||
| Circulatory or heart disease | 24% | ||
| Other conditions | 27% |
Where its care was delivered
| Setting | Percent of care | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| In a private home | 19% | ||
| In an assisted-living community | 32% | ||
| In a nursing facility | 49% |
Visits in the last days of life: 68.8% (national: 48.3%) — how often a nurse or social worker visited in the final three days.
About this hospice
Ownership: Other
Medicare-certified since: 06/15/2000
Other Medicare-certified hospices in South Dakota
- Avera @ Home Aberdeen, SD 5 of 5
- Stillwater Hospice Of South Dakota Rapid City, SD 5 of 5
- Sanford Hospice Sioux Falls, SD 3 of 5
- Brookings Health System Brookings, SD
- Heartland Home Health & Hospice LLC Belle Fourche, SD
- Huron Regional Medical Center Huron, SD
- Moments Hospice Of South Dakota Sioux Falls, SD
- Monument Health Home Plus Hospice Spearfish, SD
Families are usually choosing between several hospices, not evaluating one. Each link opens the same record for that hospice. See all hospices in South Dakota.
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.