BACKGROUND An important goal of home health care is to assist patients to remain in community living arrangements. Yet home care often fails to prevent hospitalizations and to facilitate discharges to community living, thus putting patients at risk of additional health challenges and increasing care costs. OBJECTIVES To determine the relationship between home health agency work environments a...

Home health care is a compassionate, cost-effective, and practical alternative for some individuals who require long-term or constant care. However, the coverage of home health care costs is far from comprehensive under the Medicare, Medicaid, and private pay systems. A uniform and comprehensive coverage system is necessary.

BACKGROUND There has been increasing interest in enhancing accountability in health care. As such, several methods have been developed to compare the quality of home care services. These comparisons can be problematic if client populations vary across providers and no adjustment is made to account for these differences. The current paper explores the effects of risk adjustment for a set of home...

Background The healthcare system in the United States has been plagued by service limitations imposed by financial constraints. Hospice is no exception, and hospice providers must continually seek out ways to provide cost-effective care. In response to this environment, many hospices are making a concerted effort to find efficient, low expenditure approaches to providing care without compromisi...

Home care is considered an essential pillar of the health care systems in many industrialized countries. With an increased demand for home health workers, there has been growing interest in examining recruitment and retention of these workers. With a focus on recruitment of home support workers, in this study we draw on data from interviews with 57 home support workers in three Canadian provinc...

Families and professionals agree that children and adolescents need access to community-based medical homes. This is especially true for children with special health care needs (CSHCN). Most primary care practices are designed for children's routine preventive and acute care needs. CSHCN benefit from care that is integrated with well-child and acute care; coordinated and actively co-managed wit...

A shortage of home health aides has forced the institutionalization of some consumers who could otherwise be cared for at home. Chief among the many factors that limit the supply of home health aides is the profession’s low rate of pay and scant benefits. Unionization could be a positive force in alleviating the labor shortage. To date the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) has achie...

A previous study used aggregate (region-level) data to investigate whether home health care serves as a substitute for inpatient hospital care and concluded that "there is no evidence that services provided at home replace hospital services." However, that study was based on a cross-section of regions observed at a single point of time and did not control for unobserved regional heterogeneity. ...

Electronic textiles (e-textiles) offer the promise of home health care devices that integrate seamlessly into the wearer's everyday lifestyle while providing a higher level of functionality than current devices. Existing gait analysis systems are cumbersome laboratory-based systems that, while providing valuable information, would be difficult or impossible to deploy in the home. Yet gait analy...