Home Care Quality Measures -
Percent of Patients Who Had to be Admitted to The Hospital

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This percentage addresses the ratio of home care patients who were admitted to the hospital. Lower percentages are considered better, because in many cases, home care staff can prevent the need for more care than can be provided at home. Timely hospitalization is an important safety net and must be ensured for each individual patient who requires hospital-based treatment or becomes critically ill and needs more extensive care.

The measures on hospitalization and urgent care look at how services are used rather than the outcome of care provided.

Why is this important?

Patients may need to go into the hospital while they are getting home care. In some instances, this may not be avoidable even with good home care. For instance, some chronic medical conditions are not curable and, over time, may make a patient’s health worse. For some patients, a readmission to the hospital may be a planned part of continuing treatment for their medical conditions.

However, some inpatient hospital care may be avoided if the home care staff is doing a good job at checking patients’ health conditions at each visit to detect problems early. They also need to check how well patients are eating, drinking and taking their medicines, and how safe their home is.

Home care staff must coordinate care. This involves communicating regularly with the patient, the patient’s informal caregivers, the patient’s doctor and anyone else who provides care for the patient. It is critical that the home care staff informs the patient’s doctor about a decline in condition. In some cases, the physician will want to see the patient or have him or her go to an urgent care facility or a hospital.

The U.S. and state averages for this measure were provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).