Deciding on Home Health Care: Help is Available

More and more, Americans benefit from care provided by home health agencies.  In 2002 alone, 2.5 million Medicare beneficiaries received on average, 26 visits from a home health care professional.   Baby boomers and the loved ones they care for often need to make critical decisions about home health care with limited understanding of the care.  Often these decisions are made while recovering from an illness, wound, surgery, stroke or other disabling event.  

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offers free resources to help in the decision-making process.  The CMS publication Medicare and Home Health Care is available online.  Go to www.medicare.gov and select the "Publications" link, or call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).  The publication provides information on home health care and Medicare coverage and provides suggestions of questions to ask prospective home health agencies.

CMS has also introduced a new resource called Home Health Compare on www.medicare.gov with information on Medicare-certified home health agencies.   Administrative data and measures of quality are available to help users make more informed decisions about home health care.  

For a complete list of Medicare- and Medicaid-certified home health care agencies, and to find out how they compare in quality, go to www.medicare.gov and select Home Health Compare.  You can also call 1-800 MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) to speak with a customer service representative who can answer your questions.

The eleven quality measures available for home health agencies address patients who get better at:

* getting dressed
* bathing
* getting to and from the toilet
* walking or moving around
* getting in and out of bed
* taking their medicines correctly (by mouth)

The measures also include patients who:

* stay the same (don't get worse) at bathing
* are confused less often  
* have less pain when moving around
* had to be admitted to the hospital  
* need urgent, unplanned medical care

Quality of care is an important consideration, and the new publicly available measures can help make decisions easier.  CMS also reports quality measures on nursing homes at Nursing Home Compare.

(MO-03-115-HH, July 2003
This material was prepared by MissouriPRO under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  The contents presented do not necessarily reflect CMS policy.)