Patients may need to have urgent, unplanned medical care while they are getting home health care because of a sudden downturn in their health or because of an injury. They may need to make an urgent trip to the doctor or emergency room, or a doctor may have to make an urgent house call.
In some instances, the need for unplanned urgent care may not be avoidable even with good home health care. A home health care provider may refer a patient to emergency care when this is the best way to treat the patient's current condition. However, some emergency care may be avoided if the home health clinical staff is doing a good job at checking patients' health condition to detect problems early, including monitoring nutritional status, taking their medicines correctly, and home safety. Home health staff must coordinate their care. This involves communicating regularly with them, their informal caregivers, their doctors, and anyone else who provides care for them.
This is one of 41 OASIS-based measures for which Medicare-certified home health agencies receive performance reports from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The reports cover Medicare and Medicaid adult non-maternity patients and compare each agency's rates to national reference rates and to the agency's own rates in the previous year. The reports provide home health agencies with information they can use to improve quality of care by targeting care practices that influence specific patient functioning and health status, as part of a comprehensive quality improvement approach.
This measure is also one of ten Home Health Quality Initiative measures; a resource to help consumers compare home health agencies, and they are intended to motivate home health agencies to improve care and to inform discussions about quality between consumers and clinicians.
