Hospice care occupies a specialized and growing niche in the healthcare economy as a comfort to the dying and their families, and a potential cost-saver for Medicare. With baby boomers now hitting their seventh decade, hospice is expected to become an even more important part of the healthcare landscape, according to Wharton faculty and industry analysts. While it began as a charitable endeavor run by volunteers offering relief from pain for the terminally ill, hospice organizations, including for-profit companies, served 1.2 million patients in 2005, and a third of the nation’s 2.4 million deaths occurred in hospice programs. A handful of publicly held companies provide hospice care along with hundreds of smaller private, for-profit companies and well-established non-profit ventures. Medicare picks up more than three-quarters of the bill. According to Wharton management professor John Kimberly , hospice is a business that has evolved from a purely non-profit mission into a growing healthcare business.…