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National Rankings for Home Health Agencies

We computed home health care rankings using publicly reported data downloaded from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare website (www.medicare.gov/Download/DownloadDB.asp - last accessed 3/31/08). Rates are based on episodes of care occurring between October 1, 2006 and September 30, 2007. This data set contains agency-specific, risk-adjusted, performance on 12 quality measures for over 8,700 agencies nationwide. Eleven measures that form the focus of a CMS national initiative were used in this analysis.¹ To ensure reliability and stability of the measures reported, CMS suppresses reporting for agencies with small numbers of cases.

Agencies are ranked based on their average performance rate for the measures reported. To reflect the CMS emphasis on reducing avoidable hospitalizations in this population, we gave equal weight to “Percentage of patients who had to be admitted to the hospital” and the average rank of the other measures included in the analysis. For the 6,995 agencies with a rate reported for the hospitalization measure and six or more other measures, we computed national rankings of the weighted average performance. These rankings are presented as percentiles in the results tables.

The rankings displayed on this web site are presented as percentiles. A percentile is not a success rate and is not equivalent to the performance measure rates. Percentiles are values that divide a set of observations into 100 equal parts. The percentile rank is the proportion of values in a distribution that a specific value is greater than or equal to. For example, if an agency receives a rate of 60% on improvement in management of oral meds and that rate was greater than or equal to the rates of 75% of all the other agencies then that rate would place the agency in the 75th percentile for that measure. A ranking in the 100th percentile does not necessarily mean that agencies in that percentile achieved perfect rates on all their measures. It indicates that their rates were better than all other agencies except for those who are also in the 100th percentile. Similarly, an agency with a rank in the 50th percentile did not achieve an average of 50% on their performance measures. They performed better than 50% of all the agencies in the country.

Please select your state's initials and how you wish to sort the results from the list and press the Show Results button. You can display the results for every listing type by changing the sorting type and selecting the Show Results button again.

These data have limitations that people should be aware of when interpreting the data.  For more information click here.