Which Home Health Services Are Hardest to Find

For each Medicare-certified home health agency, CMS reports whether it offers nursing care, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, medical social services, and home health aide services. Unlike the quality-of-patient-care star — which about a quarter of agencies do not have, because CMS needs enough Medicare episodes to compute one — service lines are reported for agencies regardless of whether they carry a star.

That makes this one of the few fields covering the whole certified population, so every percentage below is calculated over all 12,392 agencies rather than only the rated ones.

Most people compare home health agencies the way they would compare nursing homes: sort by rating, then check the details. For home health that order is backwards, because a service line is a hard requirement while a star is a preference. An agency with an excellent rating is no use if it does not provide the therapy the discharge plan names.

So filter first and compare second. Provider search lets you filter by the services you actually need before looking at any rating, which is the cheapest way to avoid building a shortlist you have to discard. Our guide on comparing home health agencies works through the full order.

One caveat the data cannot cover: offering a service is not the same as having capacity for a new patient this week. Agencies decline referrals when full, and no public dataset records availability in that sense. Treat this as a way to rule agencies out, then confirm by calling.

These figures describe a dated CMS snapshot, not live conditions, and an agency’s service lines can change. Service availability describes what CMS reports an agency offers, not how well it delivers it, not how many staff it has in that discipline, and not whether it can take a referral now. Nothing here ranks or recommends any agency. Confirm current services directly with the agency and on Medicare’s Care Compare. See Methodology and Data updates.