What is Home Care?
May 2006
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The scope of home care is broad. It encompasses a wide array of both
health and supportive services delivered at home. Clients cross the
spectrum of care--from seniors who need assistance with activities of
daily living in order to remain in their homes, to new mothers, discharged
quickly following childbirth with a few post-partum nursing visits for
mom and newborn, to post-surgical patients needing assistance with wound
care, to the chronically ill who are maintained with skilled supervision, support services and
equipment.
Frequently, the term "home health care" is used to refer to skilled
clinical treatments, such as the services of a registered nurse, or
physical therapist, or to receive in-home glucose monitoring or
intravenous therapies. In fact, the generic term "home care" is a more
apt description of the range of both medical and supportive services
designed to bolster the post-acute, chronically ill, disabled, and
elderly populations that home care providers serve. For such patients,
homemaking, personal care for nutrition and hygiene, and adaptive
devices to prevent slips and falls are as important to their
rehabilitation and functioning as the more sophisticated health
technologies that are also delivered at home. Both in-home clinical
care and support services are cost effective by reducing hospital
stays and by preventing or delaying institutionalization in a nursing
home.
New York’s Medicaid home care program provides this wide range of
services to over 175,000 homebound sick and elderly patients throughout
the State (2004 data) while over 188,000 New Yorkers receive home care
funded by the federal Medicare Program (2004 data). And of course,
thousands of New York State residents purchase home care services
privately and others receive home care services through private
insurance coverage in both indemnity and managed care benefit plans.
The average home care visit costs significantly less than a day of
nursing home or in-patient hospital care. Clearly, home care is the
solution to increasing health care costs, offering opportunities
for achieving real cost savings for a broad variety of patients.
New York has and must continue to look to home care as the primary source
of long term care services to keep patients in their homes and communities.
In an effective continuum of care we should expect to see increasing
levels of home care utilization, not as a result,
of "over-utilization" of home care, but as a result of shifting
utilization away from more costly settings into home care.
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