Cost-effectiveness of home care

Home health care is uniformly accepted by patients, caregivers, health professionals, policymakers, and the public as a desirable way to provide care to disabled individuals and the frail elderly. Given the lack of positive impact of home care upon functional status, cost, and nursing home use, as well as documented additional cost, future research must focus upon positive aspects from past experiences. Careful targeting of patients most likely to benefit from this care has produced better results. Satisfaction with care has been shown consistently. Managed home health care may have the potential, especially the impact of physician involvement with team care on hospital use, to contain costs. The intuitive belief that home care is beneficial and a worthwhile expense, held by policymakers and health care professionals alike, needs to be fully researched by studies that carefully examine the wide spectrum of home care benefits for disabled or chronically ill individuals in relation to varying cost levels that the population and health care system can absorb. The challenge is here, and those who believe in home care need to make use of the results of these previous, rather nonsupportive studies. Additional research is needed to measure the impact of active physician participation in the team care provision of home care services and the impact of managed home care on the cost of hospital care in the population most at risk for recurrent hospitalization. This same research must document not only more effective targeting of individuals, but also the maintenance of increased satisfaction with care--strongest motive for the need to prove the cost-effectiveness of home care.