Social Work During Skilled Home Healthcare: Prevalence and Determinants.

Background and Objectives: Medicare-funded home health (HH) delivers skilled care via visits to patients' homes. Social work (SW) services are included within the HH benefit and may positively affect outcomes for HH patients with complex needs. However, no prior work has quantitatively assessed SW provision during HH. Research Design and Methods: We examined 2018 linked HH claims, assessment, and HH agency data for a national sample of 1 372 570 Medicare HH patients. We described the prevalence, number, and timing of SW visits, compared characteristics of those who did versus did not receive SW, and modeled odds of receiving SW using a multilevel logistic model clustering at the HH agency level and adjusting for patient sociodemographic characteristics and clinical status and HH agency characteristics. Results: Just 11.3% of HH patients received SW. On average, those who received SW had a single SW visit (mean = 1.3; standard deviation [ Discussion and Implications: Findings indicate that SW access remains rare during HH and is driven by both demand-side (ie, patient needs) and supply-side (ie, agency characteristics) factors. There is a need to identify patient profiles most likely to benefit from SW services during HH and to develop strategies to mitigate agency-level barriers to access.