Nearly 40 percent of LHC Group’s home health providers are rated among the nation’s top home health agencies in a new ranking released.

Don Stelly
LHC Group president/COO
talks about achieving HomeCare Elite status

Forty-nine LHC Group home health providers incorporating 89 agency locations have been ranked among the 2011 “HomeCare Elite,” an independent rating of home health quality and performance. The 2011 HomeCare Elite list, compiled annually by OCS HomeCare and DecisionHealth, names the top 25 percent of home health agencies in the United States.

Three domains of performance were cumulatively evaluated for the 2011 list — quality of care, process measure implementation and financial performance. The quality of care component indexes agency performance in each of the 10 publicly reported Home Health Compare measures released in July 2011. The process measure implementation index is based on agencies’ rates in the 13 process measures included in the July 2011 Home Health Compare release. The financial performance measure represents agency indexed profit margin from the 2010 CMS cost reports (or adjusted 2009 results when 2010 data was not available).

Agency performance in each of the three domains was compared against the performance of other organizations in their state and throughout the country. The three domains were combined into one overall score, using a weighting methodology that gives the greatest importance to quality of care.

The top 25 percent of agencies in each region were identified, followed by the Top 100 and Top 500 nationally recognized home health agencies. In total, 9,724 Medicare-certified home health agencies had sufficient data to be considered for the annual honor, and 2,434 agencies earned recognition as 2011 HomeCare Elite.