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As the country ages, the Home Care Industry is poised to grow. The US home healthcare market is projected to grow about 7% annually from $103 billion in 2018 to $173 billion by 2026 — outpacing growth in all other care types, including hospital care (+5.3% annually) and physician services (+5.6% annually). The industry has also come into a lot of focus during the COVID-19 crisis as well.

Overview of the Home Healthcare Industry

We have put this ready reckoner guide together to help you understand the different services that make up the industry.

Simply put, Home Care involves any professional support services that allow an elderly person to live safer and better lives in the comfort of their own home and community. Home Care services enable the elderly to get assistance on time. Different types of assistance are required by the elderly:

Support to live independently

Manage a chronic health issue
Support to recover from a medical issue. For example, physical therapy for recovering from a fractured limb, hip replacement or a bypass surgery
Support for special needs or disabilities

Care can be medical or non-medical. Professional Caregivers include nurses, home care aides, and therapists. Depending on the patient’s needs the care could be long-term or short-term.

Home is the best place for care.

The focus of home care is to improve the quality of life for the elderly. Home care endeavors to provide timely care to increase independence, recover or manage a medical condition better, avoid hospitalization, and support for a post-acute care hospital stay.

Home care can include:

Help with daily chores – dressing, bathing, etc.
Non-medical assistance to manage household tasks
Short- or long-term nursing care for an illness, disease, or disability
Companionship
Therapy and rehabilitative services

Types of Home Care Services

Home Care is a complex space. Care is customized to the specific needs of each individual and may include multiple types of services. It should be noted that not all home care agencies offer all the different types of home care services. While the different types of care are required by the patients, it’s goal remains the same – to help people receiving the care achieve a better quality of life, be happy, and provide the assurance to their family members that they are in safe hands.

Non-Medical Personal Care (Personal Care and companionship)

Endeavors to provide help with daily chores such as bathing, household tasks, dressing, etc, to help the patient lead an independent and safe life.
There are many names for the services - Non-medical care, home health aide services, senior care, assistive care, assisted living, or companion care
Examples:
- Grooming, bathing, and running daily errands.
- Assistance at home for basic mobility – transfer from bed to wheelchair, wheelchair to toilet, etc.
- Medication reminders
- Companionship – conversations, engaging in home-based activities and hobbies
How is care paid for?
- Often, the services are paid directly by the consumer or through Long-term Care Insurance, Commercial Insurance, or Medicaid. Sometimes, it is also paid through regular healthcare payers, through worker’s compensation or veteran’s benefits programs.

Private Duty Nursing Care

Endeavors to help people with chronic conditions, injuries, or disability by providing long-term nursing care
There are many names for the services – Private Duty Nursing, Home-based Skilled Nursing, Shift Nursing or Adult or Paediatric Nursing
Examples:
- Support for chronic conditions such as spine injury, traumatic brain injury, etc
- Ventilator care, seizure observation, monitoring vital signs, medication and treatment administration, etc.
- Feeding tube care
How is care paid for?
- Often, the services are paid directly by the consumer or through Long-term Care Insurance, Commercial Insurance, or Medicaid. Sometimes, it is also paid through regular healthcare payers, through worker’s compensation or veteran’s benefits programs.

Home Health Care

Home Healthcare involves short-term care as directed by a physician to help patients recover from an illness and endeavors to help people with chronic conditions, injuries, or disability by providing long-term nursing care
There are many names for the services – Visiting Nurse Services, Medicare Certified Home Care Services, or Intermittent Care
Examples:
- Short-term nursing services
- Physical therapy
- Occupational therapy
- Speech-language pathology
- Home health aide services
How is care paid for?
- Home Health Care services are typically ordered by a physician and assessed for medical necessity by healthcare payers – Medicare and Commercial Payers.

Imperatives for Home Care Agencies

Each of the above 3 types of services come with specific requirements for support sought from home care agencies looking to staff, schedule, bill and get reimbursements.

Personal Care services need to be provided on an ongoing basis and a home care agency needs to be able to meet the care needs by providing 24/7 support and at times, live-in support.
Challenges in Private Duty Nursing are similar, but the quality of experience is at a different level, involving significantly higher standards of care and nursing knowledge. The challenges of scheduling Private Duty Nurses, tracking medical records, filing claims and getting reimbursements are similar to that in Personal Care Services
Home Healthcare is provided through skilled clinicians and is often in the short term, with each episode of care lasting about an hour

Software for Home Care Agencies.

The challenges of professionals providing home care and home health services create a unique set of requirements, which can only be met through specialized software. With its unique track record of helping home care agencies achieve financial success, CareVoyant is the partner you can trust to bring you software that addresses these unique challenges of operations and reimbursements.

ABOUT CAREVOYANT

CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.

CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.

For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.