ArticleThe Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association2025
Home health utilization in the Veterans Health Administration: Are there rural and urban differences?
Article in The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rural-Urban Variability in Home and Community-Based Service Use Among Veterans.Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2026Article
- Does the Veterans Health Administration Purchase High-Quality Home Health Care?Journal of the American Medical Directors Association · 2025Observational
- Home health utilization in the Veterans Health Administration: Are there rural and urban differences?The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association · 2025Article
- Exploring access to critical health services for older adults in rural America from 1990 to 2020.The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association · 2025Article
- Rural-urban disparities of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias: A scoping review.Alzheimer's & dementia (New York, N. Y.)Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeGrowing numbers of older adults need home health care, yhese services may be more difficult to access for rural Veterans, who represent one-third of Veterans Health Administration (VA) enrollees. Our objective was to examine whether home health use differs within VA based on rurality.
methodsWe examined national VA administrative data for 2019-2021 (January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2021) among Veterans ages ≥65 years. Using descriptive and multivariable analyses, we assessed whether rural versus urban Veterans differed in (1) the likelihood of using any home health and (2) for those who received ≥1 visit, number of visits received.
resultsAmong home health users (n = 107,229, 33.1% rural), rural and urban Veterans were similar in age (77.0 vs. 77.2 years). Rural Veterans were less likely to be highly frail (38.9% rural vs. 40.4% urban) or diagnosed with dementia (13.5% vs. 17.6%). After adjusting for Veterans' characteristics, rural Veterans were more likely to receive any home health (odds ratio: 1.10; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.07, 1.13). Among Veterans who received ≥1 home health visit, rurality was associated with considerably fewer expected visits (incident rate ratio: 0.70; 95% CI: 0.68, 0.72).
conclusionsAlthough rural Veterans were more likely than urban Veterans to receive any home health services, they received considerably fewer home health visits. This difference may represent an access issue for rural Veterans. Future research is needed to identify reasons for these differences and develop strategies to ensure rural Veterans' care needs are equitability addressed.
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