Kaiser Health News writes:Patients looking for home health care services will be impressed if they check out the federal government’s ratings of Brookdale Senior Living. Four of the company’s home health agencies — in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island — each earned five stars, the top quality score, primarily based on Medicare’s assessment of how often patients got better. But further research may lead to confusion. Medicare also posts stars to convey how patients rate agencies after their care is over. There, these same four Brookdale agencies earned no more than two stars. Such contradictory results between how patients view home health agencies and how the government rates them are hardly unusual. One in five agencies had clinical and patient ratings that differed by two stars or more, a Kaiser Health News analysis of government records shows.
Read more: http://khn.org/news/dueling-star-ratings-may-confuse-some-home-health-patients/