{"id":2920,"date":"2020-06-01T13:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/fammed\/rhrc\/?p=2910"},"modified":"2020-06-01T13:00:13","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T13:00:13","slug":"do-medicares-rural-add-on-payments-impact-the-number-of-home-health-agencies-serving-rural-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/2020\/06\/01\/do-medicares-rural-add-on-payments-impact-the-number-of-home-health-agencies-serving-rural-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Medicare\u2019s Rural Add-On Payments Impact the Number of Home Health Agencies Serving Rural Communities?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Home health agencies provide critical nursing and therapy services to over three million Medicare beneficiaries annually. <\/span>Delivering home health care to beneficiaries living in rural communities presents a unique set of challenges, including long travel times for staff to visit patient\u2019s homes. In recognition of these challenges, Medicare has intermittently provided a percentage increase over standard payments to home health agencies for serving rural beneficiaries, known as rural add-on payments. Yet the effect of rural add-on payments on the supply of home health agencies that serve rural communities is unknown.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Taking advantage of the pseudo-natural experiment created by varying add-on payment amounts over time<\/span> (0, 3, 5 and 10%)<\/span>, <\/span>UW Medicine researchers<\/span> Tracy Mroz<\/span><\/a> (Department of Rehabilitation Medicine), <\/span>Davis Patterson<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>Bianca Frogner<\/span><\/a> (both Department of Family Medicine) <\/span>used publicly available data from Home Health Compare to examine how rural add-on payments <\/span>affected <\/span>the number of home health agencies serving rural counties<\/span> from 2002-<\/span>2017<\/span>. Results <\/span>published today in <\/span>Health A<\/span>f<\/span>fairs<\/span><\/a> suggest that supply changes in rural counties adjacent to urban counties do not differ from urban counties regardless of the amount of rural add-on payments. However, only higher add-on payment amounts (5%, 10%)<\/span> keep supply changes in rural counties not adjacent to urban counties on pace with urban counties.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Medicare has re<\/span>cently revised how rural add-on payments are made<\/span>, <\/span>shifting from <\/span>broadly applied <\/span>payments for serving beneficiaries<\/span> in <\/span>any rural community<\/span> to payments targeted towards <\/span>serving beneficiaries in sparsely populated communities with low <\/span>home health care <\/span>utilization. Study findings <\/span>provide some <\/span>support<\/span> for<\/span> this new approach<\/span> but raise questions about<\/span> whether the current amount and eventual sunset of rural add-on payments will <\/span>maintain supply of home health agencies serving remote rural communities.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The study was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Home health agencies provide critical nursing and therapy services to over three million Medicare beneficiaries annually. Delivering home health care to beneficiaries living in rural communities presents a unique set of challenges, including long travel times for staff to visit patient\u2019s homes. In recognition of these challenges, Medicare has intermittently provided a percentage increase over […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/rhrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}