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DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO General Information and DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO Services

DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO HHS/Medicare Quality Reviews

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The information posted on this website comes from the HHS/MediCare QIO Clinical Data Warehouse. These data alone is insufficient for purposes of reliably predicting DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO , ALASKA performance. Information on this website should not be construed as an assesment of quality, endorsement or advertisement for DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO , ALASKA. Information have been updated May 7th, 2008. Please refer to the source for additional terms and instructions: Read More

If your doctor decides you need home health care, you have the freedom to choose among a list of participating Medicare-certified home health agencies (such DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO , ALASKA) that serve your geographic area to give you the care and services you need. Your choice should be honored by your doctor, hospital discharge planner, or other referring agency. Although you have a say in which agency you use, your choices may be limited by agency availability, or by your insurance coverage. (Managed care plans may require that you receive home health services from agencies they contract with.) The discharge plan should also identify any of the home health agencies in which the hospital has a financial interest. When selecting from several home health agencies, there are several factors to consider.

You can use the quality measures found in Home Health Compare (Read More) and PatientsVille.com to review what measures matter most to you and compare those measures for all the agencies. This is only one factor to consider when you are making your choice. Other factors are asking your doctor, hospital discharge planner, or social worker. You can ask friends about their home health care experiences. You can use a senior community referral service or other community services. There are differences in how home health agencies operate and one may meet your needs better than another.

Quality measures give you information about how well home health agencies (such as DENALI HOME HEALTH AND HOSPICE, AN AMEDISYS CO , ALASKA) provide care for some of their patients. The measures provide information about patients’ physical and mental health, and whether their ability to perform basic daily activities improved. Quality information can be used to help you compare home health agencies.

The quality measures may include:

• Three measures related to improvement in getting around:
  • Percentage of patients who get better at walking or moving around
  • Percentage of patients who get better at getting in and out of bed
  • Percentage of patients who have less pain when moving around

• Four measures related to meeting the patient's activities of daily living:
  • Percentage of patients whose bladder control improves
  • Percentage of patients who get better at bathing
  • Percentage of patients who get better at taking their medicines correctly (by mouth)
  • Percentage of patients who are short of breath less often

• Two measures about how home health care ends:
  • Percentage of patients who stay at home after an episode of home health care ends
  • NEW! Percentage of patients whose wounds improved or healed after an operation

• Three measures related to patient medical emergencies:
  • Percentage of patients who had to be admitted to the hospital
  • Percentage of patients who need urgent, unplanned medical care
  • NEW! Percentage of patients who need unplanned medical care related to a wound that is new, is worse, or has become infected

However, when a higher level of care is needed quickly, home health agency staff must be able to ensure patients receive medical care that cannot be provided at home. For that reason, in comparing home health agencies on the basis of what percentage of each agency’s patients received urgent care or were hospitalized, it would make sense to choose an agency that had lower than average percentages for each category of care. A wise consumer would want to see low percentages, but if no patients receive emergency care, that would also cause concern and should prompt questions to the agency about how it handles very sick or injured patients.

For each of the measures of quality, any percentages that are extremely different should raise a flag that you need more information. For instance, if for most agencies in your county, 25 - 35 percent of patients were hospitalized during a one year period, an agency where only five percent of patients spent time in a hospital during the same period should make you wonder how that could be accomplished. It may mean that some patients didn’t get the care they needed. Likewise, for measures for which higher percentages are better, if 90 percent or more of one agency’s patient showed improvement in walking while all other agencies’ had scores in the range of 60 – 70 percent, you would want to find out why and how.

Generally, when comparing the performance of home health agencies, you should get more information from the home health agency or the State agency that licenses or monitors its performance if the agency you are considering has missing data or very high (90-100%) or very low (0-10%) percentages for a performance measure that is important to you or shows the type of care you are seeking.

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