Home Health Agency Work Environments and Hospitalizations

Home Health Agency Work Environments and Hospitalizations

BACKGROUND An important goal of home health care is to assist patients to remain in community living arrangements. Yet home care often fails to prevent hospitalizations and to facilitate discharges to community living, thus putting patients at risk of additional health challenges and increasing care costs. OBJECTIVES To determine the relationship between home health agency work environments a...

Medicare personnel qualifications for therapists and home health agency compliance.

Together with the updated Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule published in the Federal Register, November 27, 2007, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) revised the personnel qualification standards for therapy services by amending Medicare Regulation 42 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Section 484.4. These new qualifications and grandfathering provisions applied to home...

Use and cost of home health agency services under Medicare

Presented are 1986 data and trend data (1974-86) on the use and cost of home health agency services rendered to aged and disabled Medicare beneficiaries. Since 1974, reimbursements for these services have grown more rapidly than overall Medicare expenditures. From 1974 to 1986, Medicare expenditures for these services increased from $141 million to $1.8 billion, an average annual rate of 24 per...

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Use of Medicare-covered home health agency services, 1988

From 1974 through 1983, Medicare-covered home health visits and expenditures increased at double digit rates (18.4 and 29.0 percent annually, respectively). During the period from 1984 through 1987, intensified bill review by fiscal intermediaries and increased denial rates led to a decline in the number of home health visits. New reimbursement policies led to a markedly reduced rate of increas...