Home Care Ratings: Our Rating System

Our Home Care Rating System

My Caring Plan gathers information from sources across the web to give you home care ratings across the nation. Our goal is to have one place you can go to find all the information you need to find the best home or care for your loved one. Start your search.

Our Data Sources

Home Health Compare:

Our primary data source is Home Health Compare from the Medicare.gov website. Home Health Compare gathers tens of thousands of data points on nursing homes across the country.

Our Home Care Rating Metrics

HHCAHPS Rating

HHCAHPS stands for Home Health Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. This survey was started in 2009 and is given to thousands of agencies across the country. The survey covers questions that concern the quality of care, pain, medication, and more. The survey is given to the home care agency’s patients to determine each agency’s overall care. My Caring Plan has the following HHCAHPS metrics listed. For all of these ratings, a higher rating is better.

• Patients who would recommend this home care agency to friends and family
• Patients who gave this home care agency a rating of 9 or 10 (out of 10)
• Percent of patients who reported that their home health team gave care in a professional way
• Patients who reported that their home health team communicated well with them
• Patients who reported that their home health team discussed medicines, pain, and home safety with them

Some home care agencies on our site will not have data for these ratings. Home care agencies must have at least 40 completed patient surveys to receive a rating.

You can visit the HHCAHPS official website here: https://homehealthcahps.org/.

Quality of Patient Care

Quality of Patient Care star rating measures the 8 following areas:

• How often the agency:
  • initiated patient care in a timely manner
• How often the patient:
  • got better at taking their drugs correctly by mouth
  • improved at walking or moving around
  • got better at getting in and out of bed
  • improved at bathing themselves
  • was able to engage in activity with less pain
  • experienced less shortness of breath
  • required acute care hospitalization

My Caring Plan includes more metrics than just the ones above. The additional metrics aren’t included in the quality of patient care star rating, but still provide additional value.

Finally, to receive a star rating for the quality of care, a home care agency must report at least 5 of these metrics above.

Sources:

1. Welcome to the official website of the Home Health Care CAHPS Survey, Home Health Care CAHPS Survey, homehealthcahps.org
2. Explore & download Medicare provider data, CMS.gov, data.cms.gov