Home Health Care: Shouldn’t It Be Work Worth Doing?<br />Home health aides trained to do more — to spot patients’ health problems, to keep track of their pills<br />and doctors’ appointments and to offer advice on healthy living — could wring billions of dollars in savings from the health care system.<br />For instance, community health workers doing home visits can help bridge the gap between patients<br />and doctors — improving rates of immunization, helping manage conditions like high blood pressure and otherwise encouraging healthy behaviors.<br />Care providers — home health aides, personal care attendants<br />and certified nursing assistants, in the government’s classification — are expected to be among the nation’s fastest-growing occupations.<br />Carol Raphael, former chief executive of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, the largest home health agency in the United States, told Professor Osterman<br />that when the association tried to expand the role of home-care aides, the “nurses went bonkers<br />They could also help manage the transition out of a hospital, ensuring<br />that patients took their medication and followed up with the doctor, to prevent them from having a relapse or ending up in a nursing home.<br />Better-trained aides could help patients manage chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes.<br />But perhaps the most important barrier is the government’s budget: Medicaid — funded by federal<br />and state governments — picks up more than half the tab for the $300 billion or so spent every year on long-term care.
