First Choice Home Care, Inc

What this costs you

If a doctor certifies the patient is homebound and needs skilled nursing or therapy, Medicare pays this agency directly and the patient pays nothing for the covered visits. Equipment is billed separately at 20% of the Medicare-approved amount. Home health does not pay for round-the-clock care, meals, or help with bathing and dressing on its own, those are the costs families are most often surprised by.

• Patient experience

  19.5 / 30

  What patients said about the agency afterwards, in the CMS-run HHCAHPS survey, the only federal home health measure that comes from patients rather than from the agency.

  • No patient survey published, CMS suppresses results below a minimum number of completed surveys. Scored just under the national average rather than guessed at, because suppression tracks how small an agency is, not how good it is

• Staying home

  16.25 / 25

  Whether patients stayed living in the community afterwards, and how often they went back to hospital for something home health should have caught.

  • No discharge-to-community rate published, scored just under the national average rather than guessed at
  • No preventable-readmission rate published, scored just under the national average rather than guessed at

• Recovery at home

  10 / 20

  How much of the expected improvement in dressing, bathing and moving around patients actually reached by the time care ended, risk-adjusted by CMS for how they arrived.

  • 50 discharge function score (national median 67.3)

• Care transitions

  9.75 / 15

  Whether the patient and their next doctor were handed an accurate, current medicine list when home health ended, the handover where things get missed.

  • No care-transition measures published, scored just under the national average rather than guessed at

• Starting on time

  5 / 10

  How often care actually began within the window the doctor ordered, or within two days of leaving hospital.

  • 95.8% of patients had care started on time (national median 97.8%)

Did it work?

Home health is judged on whether the patient stayed home, stayed out of hospital and got more capable. These are this agency's numbers against the national median.

What patients said

CMS has not published survey results for this agency. It only reports them once enough patients have completed the questionnaire, so smaller agencies often have none. That is a gap in the data, not a mark against the agency, ask them directly how many patients they served last year and whether they run their own survey.

Services offered

• · Skilled nursing care
• · Physical therapy
• · Occupational therapy
• · Speech pathology
• · Home health aide
• · Medical social services

Improvement measures

The agency's own assessment of how many patients got better. We publish these because families ask about them, and we leave them out of the grade because none of them separated agencies when we tested them against what patients themselves reported.

• Got better at walking or moving around 79%
• Got better at getting in and out of bed 79%
• Got better at bathing 100%
• Breathing improved 75%
• Got better at taking their medicines correctly 44%

Published, and deliberately not graded on

Before weighting anything we checked which direction each CMS measure actually runs, by comparing it against the patient survey across every agency in the country. These did not survive that check. They are here because they are part of the public record, and out of the grade because scoring them would make our letters worse, not better.

CMS quality of patient care star rating

2.5 of 5

CMS's own composite. Across every agency where both are published it tracks the patient survey at essentially zero, so we show it and do not grade on it.

Falls with major injury

0.00%

Also runs backwards, in every size band. It appears to measure whether an agency records adverse events rather than whether they happen. Left out of the grade.

Other agencies nearby

Questions families ask about First Choice Home Care, Inc

Does Medicare pay for First Choice Home Care, Inc?

Yes, if a doctor certifies the patient is homebound and needs intermittent skilled nursing or therapy. Medicare then pays First Choice Home Care, Inc directly for covered home health visits and the patient pays nothing for them. Durable medical equipment is billed separately at 20% of the approved amount. Home health does not cover round-the-clock care, meals, or help with bathing and dressing on its own.

How is First Choice Home Care, Inc graded?

ElderGrade grades it C, average, scoring 61 out of 100 on the federal home health record: what patients themselves reported, whether they went on living in the community and stayed out of hospital, how much function they regained, whether the handover to their next doctor was done, and whether care started on time. We take no payment from agencies.