Acacia Certified Home Care Co
Utica, NY
- Patient rating
- 5/5
- Still living at home
- 91%
NON-PROFIT
Above average
77 / 100
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. Medicare spends 0.91× the national average per episode of care at this agency. That is what the federal government spends, not what a family pays, and it is not part of our grade.
Patient experience
26.5 / 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.
Staying home
16.3 / 25
Whether patients stayed living in the community afterwards, and how often they went back to hospital for something home health should have caught.
Recovery at home
18.4 / 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.
Care transitions
8.8 / 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.
Starting on time
7.2 / 10
How often care actually began within the window the doctor ordered, or within two days of leaving hospital.
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.
From the HHCAHPS survey, which CMS sends to the agency's own patients after care. These are not online reviews and the agency cannot select who is asked. Percentages are the share who gave the best possible answer. 28% of those asked replied.
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.
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'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.
Runs backwards against the patient survey: agencies CMS labels worse than the national rate average higher patient ratings than those it labels better. Left out of the grade.
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.
A cost measure with no relationship to what patients reported. Left out of the grade.
Utica, NY
NON-PROFIT
Source: the CMS Home Health Care Agencies file and the HHCAHPS Patient Survey, published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. ElderGrade takes no payment from agencies, chains or placement agencies, and holds no photographs of this provider. Graded 23 August 2026. How we source our data.