Your §418.113 communication-plan contacts, kept current and survey-ready
The hospice Emergency Preparedness rule requires a maintained contact list — staff, contracted entities, physicians, other hospices, and emergency officials — reviewed at least every two years, and a 24/7 way to reach the right clinician. Care Roster keeps exactly those contacts and your on-call coverage organized, dated, and ready to print, so what you maintain all year is what you hand a surveyor. No patient data, ever.
- Maps to 42 CFR §418.113 + §418.100(c)
- Printable emergency sheet — works when systems are down
- No patient data, no BAA required
What this guide is: a plain-language look at the two hospice Conditions of Participation a contact directory and on-call tool actually touches — the Emergency Preparedness communication plan and 24/7 availability — and how Care Roster helps you keep those records current. What it is not: legal advice, and Care Roster is not your whole emergency-preparedness program. Confirm your obligations with your accreditor and state authority.
42 CFR §418.113(c) — the emergency-preparedness communication plan
Every Medicare-certified hospice must develop and maintain an emergency-preparedness communication plan with up-to-date contact information for the people and organizations below — and review and update it at least every two years. A maintained, categorized, regularly-verified directory is almost a literal description of what that plan needs.
Hospice staff — including volunteers
The plan must list names and contact information for hospice employees. Under 42 CFR §418.3, "employee" includes a volunteer under the hospice's jurisdiction, so the communication plan reaches your volunteers as well as paid staff. Appendix Z (tag E-0030) names volunteers explicitly.
- Staff names
- Reachable phone / contact
- Volunteers included
- Kept current
Care Roster helps: your People directory holds internal staff and volunteer contacts in one place, with Microsoft 365 sync to pull staff from your source of truth so the list does not go stale.
Contracted entities, physicians & other hospices
The plan must also list entities providing services under arrangement (contracted pharmacies, DME suppliers, inpatient units, labs), your patients' physicians, and other hospices. These are exactly the external organizations a hospice already calls every day.
- Services under arrangement
- Physicians
- Other hospices
- Multiple reachable numbers
Care Roster helps: the Organizations directory holds these contacts by category, each with multiple labeled numbers (main, after-hours, fax) — the contracted providers and peer organizations the plan must enumerate.
Emergency-preparedness officials & other assistance
Beyond your own staff and vendors, the plan must include contact information for federal, state, tribal, regional, and local emergency-preparedness staff and other sources of assistance — the numbers you would actually need to call in a disaster.
- Emergency-prep officials
- Other sources of assistance
- One findable place
Care Roster helps: Key Numbers is where you keep the emergency-official and outside-assistance numbers, alongside the rest of your directory so they are not on a separate sheet no one can find.
Reviewed and updated at least every two years
The emergency plan and the communication plan both carry a standing obligation: review and update at least every two years. The hard part is not the review itself — it is being able to show a surveyor that it happened.
- Periodic review
- A dated record
- Evidence on demand
Care Roster helps: contact verification stamps each contact with who reviewed it and when, on a review cadence you set — set it to every two years for the EP cycle. The dashboard surfaces what's due for review and gives you a printable "needs review" list, so the dated records are your evidence the contacts were reviewed and refreshed.
42 CFR §418.100(c) — someone reachable around the clock
The Conditions of Participation require that nursing services, physician services, and drugs and biologicals be routinely available on a 24-hour basis, 7 days a week. The operational question a surveyor asks: can you show who was reachable, and that the chain held when the first call did not pick up?
A documented, current on-call roster
Care Roster's on-call rotation shows who is on call now, and the coverage-and-override layer lets you adjust who is covering a given shift without rewriting the base rotation — so the roster always reflects who is actually available tonight. Named escalation paths define the next step before it is needed, and the printable emergency sheet puts the on-call list and after-hours contacts on one page that still works when the power or network is down.
- Who's on call, now
- Coverage & overrides
- Escalation paths
- Printable shift sheet
The contacts and coverage, in one place
A binder no one updated vs. a directory that's always current
The contact list in a binder Problem
- Contacts go stale; no record of when they were last checked
- The two-year review is reconstructed from memory at survey time
- On-call coverage lives on a whiteboard, not in a record
- If the network is down, no one can reach the list
The Care Roster way Solved
- One live directory of staff, vendors, physicians, and officials
- Contact verification stamps a dated review record
- On-call rotation, coverage, and escalation in one place
- A printable emergency sheet that works offline
Hospice emergency-preparedness contacts, answered
What does the hospice Emergency Preparedness communication plan require?
Under 42 CFR §418.113(c), every Medicare-certified hospice must develop and maintain an emergency-preparedness communication plan that includes names and contact information for hospice employees, entities providing services under arrangement, patients' physicians, and other hospices, plus contact information for federal, state, tribal, regional, and local emergency-preparedness officials and other sources of assistance. The plan must be reviewed and updated at least every two years (§418.113(a) and (c)).
Does Care Roster make us emergency-preparedness compliant?
No. Care Roster is a contact-directory and on-call tool — it keeps the communication-plan contact lists and your 24/7 on-call roster current and survey-ready. A complete §418.113 emergency-preparedness program also needs an all-hazards risk assessment, written policies and procedures, and a training, testing, and exercise program, which live outside Care Roster. Care Roster covers the contact-directory and on-call slices; you pair it with the rest of your EP plan.
How does Care Roster help with the every-two-years review?
Care Roster's contact verification stamps each contact with who reviewed it and when, on a review cadence you set — you can set it to every two years to match the EP cycle. The dashboard surfaces what's due and you can print a "needs review" list, so the dated records are your evidence that the contacts were reviewed and updated, instead of reconstructing it from memory when a surveyor asks. (A single plan-level "reviewed on" stamp for the whole communication plan is on our roadmap.)
Where is hospice emergency preparedness actually surveyed?
Emergency preparedness for all provider types, including hospices, is surveyed under the CMS State Operations Manual Appendix Z. The communication-plan contact requirements correspond to tags E-0030 (names and contact information, which explicitly includes volunteers) and E-0031 (external contacts such as emergency-preparedness officials and other sources of assistance). This is general information, not legal advice — confirm your obligations with your accreditor and state authority.
This page is general information, not legal advice. Hospice emergency-preparedness and 24/7 requirements come from federal regulation, CMS interpretive guidance, your accreditor, and state law — and they change. Confirm your specific obligations with your accreditor and your state hospice authority.
Keep your communication-plan contacts survey-ready
Start a free 45-day trial, build your directory of staff, vendors, physicians, and emergency officials, mark them reviewed, and print an emergency sheet your night shift can actually use. No credit card, no patient data, every feature included.