Bill Dombi, President, NAHC

From new legislation to market changes, home care is in a position of growth it has never been in before.

“This is an age in home care that is really a realization of the efforts of many decades of work to demonstrate not just the value, but the dynamic value of care in the home,” Bill Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, said in a McKnight’s Home Care podcast this week. It’s extraordinary that home care “can meet needs of patients at such a wide range of levels of care from the purely personal care needs with activities of daily living to a scope of needs that would otherwise place the person as an inpatient bed in a hospital setting or skilled nursing facility.”

The growth in various directions is apparent in bills such as the Better Care Better Jobs Act, that would grow Medicaid home- and community-based services, and Choose Home, a bill expected to be introduced that would address the Medicare’s role in treating higher-acuity patients at home.

To be a part of this expansion, a home care provider would be wise to offer a service along the long home care spectrum, such as hospital at home, palliative care or hospice, Dombi said.

If he was an agency owner, “I’d better be connected on that horizontal spectrum, somehow, some way to that breadth of services or I’m going to have a much harder time in business,” he said.

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