Home Health Care Services provides some of the same types of care that you might receive in a skilled nursing facility but in your own home. These include:
Skilled Nursing Care: provided on a part-time basis (no more than eight hours a day over a period of 21 days or less) and include services such as injections, feeding through a tube, and changing catheters and wound dressings.
Physical, Speech, and Occupational Therapy: from professional therapists to help you walk again, overcome problems in talking, or regaining the ability to perform everyday tasks, such as feeding and dressing yourself, whichever your medical condition requires.
Help from Home Health Aides: helping with personal activities, such as going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, or preparing a light meal if necessary in relation to your illness or injury. However, is this personal care is the only kind of care you need, you do not qualify for home health coverage.
Medical Supplies: such as catheters and wound dressings.
Medical Social Services: such as counseling for social or emotional concerns related to your illness or injury and help finding community resources if needed.
Medicare covers all these services in full by paying a home health agency a single payment to provide them for 60 days at a time. Rules for qualifying for this benefit are strict. The following conditions must be met:
- You must be homebound, that is, unable to leave home without considerable effort
- A doctor must certify that you need one or more of the professional services in either skilled nursing, physical or occupational therapy, or speech pathology.
- You must be under a plan of care established and regularly reviewed by a doctor.
- The home health agency caring for you must be approved by Medicare.
Farnum Health Insurance 