{"id":2140,"date":"2008-12-02T19:41:45","date_gmt":"2008-12-02T19:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2008-12-02T19:41:45","modified_gmt":"2008-12-02T19:41:45","slug":"troubling_stati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2140","title":{"rendered":"Troubling Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Minnesota has a reputation of providing quality health care to its citizens. But, according to an analysis of federal quality measures, our home health care agencies rank abysmally low<\/a> in comparison to those in other states. It’s an alarming finding, but I’m not sure how accurately it reflects the true state of affairs. For one thing, the data was gathered from only 160 Medicare-certified home care agencies in Minnesota. There are hundreds more agencies that provide personal care services throughout the state and many aren’t Medicare-certified because they don’t need to be. Any discussion of home care quality should encompass the whole range of providers. Second, I’d like more information about the quality measures themselves. The article notes that the measures reflect “the percentage of patients who get better at walking, bathing, taking medications and other measures of well-being”. Okay, but how do the agencies track this data? Does a visiting nurse fill out a form during a monthly visit? Does the nurse know the person well enough to accurately comment on whether improvement is occurring? <\/p>\n

I also find it interesting that owners of the higher-performing agencies quoted in the article emphasize their strong relationships and familiarity with their clients. One of the most common complaints about home health agencies is that their inability to retain staff results in inconsistent care for the person. That was definitely one of my complaints about the nursing agencies I used and it was a contributing factor to my decision to stop using agencies. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minnesota has a reputation of providing quality health care to its citizens. But, according to an analysis of federal quality measures, our home health care agencies rank abysmally low in comparison to those in other states. It’s an alarming finding, but I’m not sure how accurately it reflects the true state of affairs. For one […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-yw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}