Home health care is a wide range of health care services that you can receive at Home Care in Vista CA in the event of an illness or injury. Home health care is often less expensive, more convenient, and as effective as the care you receive in a hospital or skilled nursing facility (SNF). When considering receiving home health care services, it can be helpful to know the jargon. This is a glossary of commonly used terms in Home Care in Vista CA.
.Home care
(also called home care, social care, or home care) is supportive care provided at Home Care in Vista CA.Care can be provided by licensed health professionals who provide medical treatment or by professional caregivers who provide daily assistance to ensure that activities of daily living (ADL) are being met. Home health care is often, and more accurately, referred to as home health care or formal care. Home health care is different from non-medical care, custodial care, or private care, which refers to care and services provided by people who are not nurses, doctors or other licensed medical personnel. For patients recovering from surgery or illness, home care may include rehabilitation therapy.
For terminally ill patients, home care may include palliative care. Home health care is a system of care provided by qualified professionals to patients in their homes under the direction of a physician. Home health care services include nursing care; physical, occupational, and speech-language therapy; and medical social services.1 The goals of home health care services are to help people improve their functioning and live more independently; to promote the client's optimal level of well-being; and to help the patient stay at home, avoiding hospitalization or admission to long-term care institutions. From 2 to 4 doctors can refer patients to home health care services, or family members can request patient services. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that 8,090 home health agencies in the United States provide care for more than 2.4 million elderly and disabled people a year5. In order to receive reimbursement from Medicare, a doctor must consider that home health care services are medically necessary by a doctor and are provided to a homebound patient.
In addition, care must be provided intermittently and discontinuously, 5 Medicare beneficiaries who are in poor health, low incomes, and 85 years or older have relatively high rates of home health care use, 6 common diagnoses among home health care patients include circulatory diseases (31 percent of patients), heart disease (16 percent), injuries and poisoning (15.9 percent), musculoskeletal and connective tissue diseases (14.1 percent), and respiratory diseases ( 11.6 percent). Professional doctors have no authority over these caregivers. In addition, the family environment and the intermittent nature of professional home health care services can limit a doctor's ability to observe the quality of care provided by informal caregivers, unlike what happens in the hospital, where the care provided by support staff can be more easily observed and evaluated. For example, because of limited access to transportation, a husband may decide not to buy diabetes supplies for his dependent wife.
The doctor may not pay attention to this behavior until an adverse event has occurred. Evidence-based interventions are based on careful evaluation. However, the scarcity of opportunities to observe the patient and informal caregivers directly may hamper efforts to rapidly determine the etiology of an adverse event. If a patient receiving home health care has bruises that the patient can't explain, is the cause a fall, physical abuse, or blood dyscrasia? Both with regard to self-care by patients and care provided by informal caregivers, safety and quality standards may not be understood or achieved.
The objectives and multidisciplinary nature of home health care services present challenges for measuring quality that differ from those found in a more traditional hospital environment. The CMS requires reporting on home health care outcome measures. The outcome-based quality monitoring (OBQM) program monitors, reports and compares adverse events, such as emergency care for injuries caused by falls or accidents, the increase in the number of pressure ulcers, and the substantial decrease of three or more ADLs.5 Available evidence suggests that, in addition to the use of APNs for the care of complex cases, traditional home health professionals, individually or interdisciplinary, can prevent unplanned hospital admissions with specific interventions. While researchers and other home care experts have recommended numerous strategies, most interventions have not been empirically tested. There is also a need to further analyze the costs and benefits of the various interventions.
The measurement of the costs of the intervention and the cost savings derived from avoided hospitalizations are not well understood. Some patient populations, due to the nature and complexity of the advanced disease process, may require more intensive and specialized home health care services, without generating cost savings. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that the use of apparently more expensive transition resources, such as APNs, is cost-effective, although the adoption of these research-based best practices may be hampered by a lack of reimbursement and incentives 48. Research is needed to understand the impact of the transfer of care and the cost to home health care on patient outcomes and the fiscal position of the home health care sector. Home health services include medically necessary skilled nursing services, specialized therapies (such as physical therapy, speech-language pathology, and occupational therapy), home health care services, and medical supplies.
These services are provided to beneficiaries in any environment in which normal life activities take place, excluding hospitals, nursing facilities or intermediate care facilities for people with intellectual disabilities. Available evidence suggests that, in addition to the use of APNs to treat complex cases, traditional home health professionals, on an individual or interdisciplinary basis, may be effective in preventing unplanned hospital admissions through specific interventions. HIT is the information processing application that involves both computer hardware and software that deals with the storage, retrieval, exchange and use of health care information, data and knowledge for communication and decision-making. Evidence on the outcomes of home health care is limited; there are very few controlled experiments that providers can base their practice on. It is not known what characteristics of the home nursing work environment are related to patient safety and quality.
Before you start getting home health care, the home health agency must tell you how much Medicare will pay. Home health nurses must be well informed about the use of the full range of products, practices and treatments for existing and emerging wounds, and demonstrate their ability to accurately evaluate and stage wounds. The national campaign to improve the quality of home health care uses a multidisciplinary approach to improving quality that includes key stakeholders in home health, hospitals and doctors. An intervention model that does not seem to be effective is the model for managing and evaluating health outcomes, tested by Feldman and his colleagues66. This model adds a consumer-oriented self-care guide for patients and training to improve nurses' teaching and support skills. As a long-term care nurse, you enjoy job security and, at the same time, make a positive difference in people's lives every day. Hospice is a set of comprehensive services for terminally ill patients with a medically determined life expectancy of 6 months or less.
Feldman and his colleagues56 examined the relationship between adverse patient effects and the characteristics of the nurses' work environment in a large urban home health care agency. If your provider decides that you need home health care, they should provide you with a list of agencies that provide services in your area. Most older patients who receive home health care routinely take more than five prescription medications, and many patients deviate from the prescribed medication regimen. Because of both normal aging and pathological processes that occur more frequently with age, some older people will experience a decline in their ability to carry out activities of daily living (ADL), even when they are provided with high-quality home health care.
Home health services can be provided in an intermediate care facility for people with intellectual disabilities, but only if the facility does not require these services to provide them under subpart I of part 483.
