By Kathy Cooper
Joe Karp, a Certified Elder Law Attorney in Florida, recently published an interesting blog post about a customer rating system that is now available on-line for home health care through Medicare. Those of us who shop on-line have become very reliant on the customer ratings available through sites like Amazon. We look at the bad as well as the good to make up our minds about whether this is the product we want. We want to know the experiences of those who have purchased before us.
Shopping for home health care is no different. You want to know the experiences that others have had with an agency that will help you, your spouse or your mother on a daily basis. I wish I had been able to have an Amazon-like customer rating when my mother had her first stroke and we needed in-home speech therapy and occupational therapy. As it was, I was left to guess. Had the agency screened the caregivers adequately? Would they treat my mother like a child or, as I hoped, like a rational adult? How dependable where they? What if I had a question or concern, how would they handle it?
Here is the website that will direct you to the comparison site for Medicare-certified home health agencies near you: Home Health Compare. You can enter a zip code for a listing or you can enter a specific agency. Once you have chosen agencies to compare, you will have the choice to look at Patient Survey Results. It is a fairly new service, so give it time if you can and contribute, please! This will help all of us.
By the way, Joe is a member of a nationwide group, the American Association of Trust, Estate and Elder Law Attorneys. Our own Attorneys Thom Cooper and Mitch Adel are members and Thom is a past-president. It helps to have a group of individuals who can provide a national perspective on issues that affect our clients. If you would like to discuss how you can plan to protect your assets in a situation where you need home health care, assisted living or a nursing home stay, give us a call.











