Home Health & Hospice Week

Here are the stats the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is using when making its influential recommendations to Congress about your Medicare payments:

• There were 11,300 Medicare-certified home health agencies in 2010, which is up 50 percent since 2002 and exceeds highs set in the 1990s.
• More than 1,000 new agencies opened in 2009.
• Growth is concentrated in a few areas, such as Florida and Texas.
• The number of home health users has grown 3.9 percent since 2002, to 3.3 million in 2009.
• The number of home health episodes has grown 6.9 percent from 2002 to 2009, to 6.5 million.
• The number of episodes per user has grown from 1.6 to 2.0 from 2002 to 2009.
• In 2001, episodes were split about evenly between admissions from the community versus the hospital. In 2008, 64 percent of admissions came from the community.
• In 2009, freestanding HHAs had an average profit margin of 17.7 percent. The margins varied widely, with agencies at the 25th percentile having a 2.2 percent margin and agencies at the 75th percentile having a 26.2 percent margin.
• In 2009, for-profit freestanding HHAs had an average 18.7 percent profit margin while non-profits saw a 14.4 percent average margin.
• Urban freestanding agencies saw a 17.9 percent average profit margin in 2009, while rural agencies recorded a 16.6 percent margin.
• In 2008, the national average percentage of beneficiaries in a county using home health services was 9 percent. In contrast, certain high-utilization counties in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi saw rates of up to 35 percent.
• The prospective payment system was based on visit figures that averaged 32 per episode, but agencies currently make an average of 22 visits per episode.