The number of high-quality Medicare-certified home health agencies has gone down slightly over the years, according to data from the recently released 2023 Home Care Chartbook from the Research Institute for Home Care (RIHC).
The chartbook is an annual overview of the home health landscape.
“A lot of what we know hasn’t really changed for 2023 with the 2022, and in some cases, the 2021 data,” Jennifer Schiller, executive director at RIHC, told Home Health Care News.
Overall, the home health industry has seen the number of active agencies decrease since 2014.
In total, there were 11,353 active home health agencies in 2022, 11,474 in 2021, 11,565 in 2020, and 11,569 in 2019.
Additionally, the report measured the amount of active, high-quality agencies. RIHC considers an agency high-quality if it has a quality of patient care (QoPC) star rating, or patient survey star rating of four or higher.
In 2022, there were 2,714 agencies with a QoPC star rating of four or higher, compared to 2,734 in the previous year.
There were also 2,534 agencies with a patient survey star rating of four or higher in 2022, compared to 3,876 in 2021.
The report also looked at how satisfied Medicare home health users were with the care services they received in 2021.
About 46.5% of respondents said they were “very satisfied.” On the other end of the spectrum, 2% of respondents said they were “very dissatisfied.” Meanwhile, 46.2% of respondents were satisfied and 5.2% were dissatisfied.
Plus, RIHC looked at a number of performance metrics across states, including how often home health teams kicked off patient care in a timely manner.
Impact on the economy
Aside from quality and performance measures, RIHC also looked at home health care’s economic impact.
The report looked at how many jobs the home health industry created in the labor market on a state level.
Texas created the most amount of jobs – 403,911. While Wyoming created — 971 — the least amount of jobs. In total, home health created 2,215,604 jobs across the U.S.
“On the whole, jobs are growing in home health,” Schiller said. “There is a need for home health workers. There is a need for nurses. There is a need for staff. There’s a need for people to provide care in the home, so it really is an important benefit both for patients and, frankly, for the economy as well.”
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