Home Health Compare Poses Small Impact on Market Area Exit Decisions

According to authors Jung and Feldman, the introduction of Home Health Compare, a public reporting program initiated by Medicare in 2003, had a very small and weak effect on selective exits by home health agencies between 2002 and 2004,. A 10-percent increase in reporting, the equivalent to reporting one more indicator per agency, increased the probability of a home health agency leaving an area with less-educated people by 0.3 percentage points, compared with leaving an area with high education. This small level of market-area exits under public reporting is unlikely to be practically meaningful, suggesting that Home Health Compare did not lead to a disruption in access to home health care through selective exits during the initial year of the program. Read the full paper, “Medication Days’ Supply, Adherence, Wastage, and Cost Among Chronic Patients in Medicaid,” published in Volume 2, Issue 4 of the Medicare & Medicaid Research Review.

 Read the full article:  http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Research/MMRR/Downloads/MMRR2012_002_04_A06.pdf