Home Health & Hospice Week

It’s not just access to home health services that can affect patients’ outcomes — it’s also access to high-quality home health services.

So suggests a new study published in the latest issue of the journal Health Affairs. The study, “Out Of Reach: Inequities In The Use Of High-Quality Home Health Agencies,” notes that “patients receiving home health services from high-quality home health agencies often experience fewer adverse outcomes (for example, hospitalizations) than patients receiving services from low-quality agencies.”

Study authors, including those from the University of Minnesota and Brown University, “found that Black and Hispanic home health patients had a 2.2-percentage-point and a 2.5-percentage-point lower adjusted probability of high-quality agency use, respectively, compared with their White counterparts within the same neighborhoods,” according to the study’s abstract. And “low-income patients had a 1.2-percentage-point lower adjusted probability of high-quality agency use compared with their higher-income counterparts,” it says.

There may not be an easy fix, however. “Ameliorating these inequities will require policies that dismantle structural and institutional barriers related to residential segregation,” suggests the study at https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01408.