Description, Health Care Utilization, And Outcomes For Home Health Care (Hhc) Covid-19 Patients Early In The Pandemic: A Comparison To The General Hhc Population

COVID-19 patients represent a new and distinct population in home health care. Little is known about health care utilization and incremental improvements in health for recovering COVID-19 patients after admission to home health care. Using a retrospective observational cohort study of 5452 episodes of home health care admitted to a New Jersey Home Health Agency between March 15 and May 31, 2020, this study describes COVID-19 Home Health Care (HHC) patients (n = 842) and compare them to the general HHC population (n=4610). COVID HHC patients differ in significant ways from the typical HHC population. COVID patients were more likely to be 65 years of age and younger (41% vs 26%), be from a racial/ ethnic minority (60% vs 31 %), live with another person (85% vs 76%), have private insurance (28% vs 16%), and began HHC with greater independence in activities-of-daily-living (ADUIADLs). COVID patients received fewer overall visits than their non-COVID counterparts (11.7 vs 16.3), although they had significantly more remote visits (1.7 vs 0.3). Multivariate analyses show that COVID patients early in the pandemic were 34% (CI, 28%-40%) less likely to be hospitalized and demonstrated significantly greater improvement in all the outcome measures examined compared to the general home health population.