Palliative Performance Scale (PPS) and Hospice

By Eric Shaban, MD, Regional Medical Director, VITAS Healthcare

The Palliative Performance Scale (PPS)¹ can inform decisions about a patient’s hospice eligibility by helping clinicians recognize a patient's functional decline.

For oncology patients, a PPS score of 70% or below may indicate hospice eligibility.

For most other disease types, a patient with a PPS score of 50% or below may be hospice-eligible. A general way to determine this is to ask yourself: “Does the patient with advanced illness spend more than 50% of their waking hours resting (sitting and lying)?”

Please note that this calculator is an approximation of PPS and does not substitute clinical judgment.