How to use Medicare Care Compare for home health agencies.

Medicare's Care Compare tool is the closest thing the public has to an objective quality benchmark for Medicare-certified home health agencies. It's free, federally maintained, and drawn from the same survey data that determines whether an agency keeps its certification. For families considering a Medicare-certified home health agency, Care Compare is one of the four checks worth doing before engagement (the others — license verification, references, caregiver vetting — are covered in our companion guide).

This guide walks through what Care Compare is, what it shows, how to read it, and where its limits are.

What Care Compare is

Care Compare is the consumer-facing tool that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes to make Medicare-certified provider quality data publicly searchable. It covers several provider categories — hospitals, nursing homes, hospice agencies, dialysis facilities, and home health agencies. For families researching home care, the home health agency section is the relevant one.

Two important boundaries: Care Compare only covers Medicare-certified agencies, and only covers their Medicare-certified service lines. Three implications follow from that:

1. Private-pay companion-care and personal-care agencies that don't bill Medicare won't appear in Care Compare. Most non-medical home-care agencies fall in this category.
2. A Medicare-certified home health agency may also offer private-pay services that aren't captured in Care Compare data. The star rating reflects the agency's Medicare-certified work, not its full operation.
3. The federal data set is generated from CMS surveys, the standardized HHCAHPS patient-experience survey, and OASIS clinical assessment data. State-level licensing surveys and complaints filed with state regulators are captured separately on the state's own portal.

What data Care Compare shows

For each Medicare-certified home health agency, Care Compare publishes:

• Quality of patient care star rating (1 to 5 stars). This is calculated from a basket of OASIS clinical-improvement measures — whether patients improved in mobility, in bathing, in pain management, in shortness of breath, and several other conditions over the course of their home-health episode. The rating is published with a date stamp; CMS recalculates and reposts on a regular cadence.
• Patient survey star rating (1 to 5 stars). This is calculated from HHCAHPS responses — patients' or family members' answers to standardized questions about how the agency communicated, how courteous and professional caregivers were, and whether the patient would recommend the agency.
• Sample size for the patient survey. A four-star agency with five survey responses is statistically much weaker than a four-star agency with five hundred. CMS publishes the sample-size context.
• Survey results and any deficiencies found during recent CMS or state surveys, including the date of the most recent survey.
• Service offerings — which Medicare-covered services the agency actually delivers (skilled nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, medical social services, home health aide services).
• Languages and ownership — what languages caregivers speak, whether the agency is for-profit, nonprofit, or government-owned.

How to use it — step by step

1. Open Care Compare at medicare.gov/care-compare.
2. Select "Home health services" as the provider type.
3. Enter your loved one's ZIP code or city/state. The tool returns a list of Medicare-certified home health agencies serving that location, ordered by distance.
4. Compare up to three agencies side by side. Care Compare's compare view displays the quality star rating, patient survey star rating, sample size, and service offerings in a single table.
5. Click into an individual agency's page for the full detail — the date of the most recent CMS survey, any deficiencies cited, the patient-survey response breakdown, and ownership information.

How to read the data

A few interpretive notes that matter:

• Star ratings are relative, not absolute. A four-star quality rating means the agency's clinical-improvement scores fell in the second-best of CMS's five rating tiers — better than three-star agencies, lower than five-star. Two agencies with the same star rating are not necessarily equivalent; a three-star agency at the top of its tier and a three-star agency at the bottom of its tier are visually identical on the rating display but materially different in the underlying scores.
• Patient survey sample size matters. When the response count is very low (CMS notes when a sample is below the publication threshold), interpret the patient star rating with caution. An agency with twenty-five survey responses producing a four-star rating is more credible than the same star rating drawn from five responses.
• Recent survey deficiencies are the most actionable detail on the page. If CMS or a state surveyor cited the agency for medication-management lapses, infection-control issues, or aide-supervision shortcomings within the last year, that's specific and substantive — much more useful than the aggregate star rating for predicting how the agency will handle your loved one's care.
• Look at service offerings against your need. A five-star agency that doesn't offer occupational therapy is worse for your loved one than a four-star agency that does, if OT is what's needed.

What Care Compare doesn't cover

Care Compare's limits matter for setting expectations:

• Non-Medicare-certified home care. The largest segment of the home-care market — private-pay companion care, personal care, homemaking, non-medical respite — is not in Care Compare at all. For those, license verification through the state regulator and reference calls are the available oversight.
• Cost. Care Compare does not publish what an agency charges. Costs vary by service line, geography, payment source (Medicare vs. Medicaid vs. private pay vs. long-term care insurance), and individual care plan.
• Caregiver match quality. The HHCAHPS patient survey captures aggregate patient experience but not whether a specific caregiver was a good match for a specific client. Reference calls remain the most useful signal on caregiver match.
• State-licensing complaints filed but not yet escalated to CMS. Care Compare reflects CMS-level survey results. State regulators' complaint logs may carry additional information; check the state regulator's complaint portal in addition to Care Compare.

Combining Care Compare with the other verification steps

Care Compare is one input. The other three from our verification guide are:

• Step 1 — State licensing verification. Confirm the agency holds the appropriate license type (home health, home care, both) for the services contracted.
• Step 2 — Real client references. Two or three families currently using the agency, named by the agency at your request, and asked the questions in the verification guide.
• Step 3 — Caregiver background-check and training. What the agency runs at hire and on a recurring basis; how supervision works; how the agency handles a caregiver mismatch.

A family that does all four checks before engaging is doing the diligence the system relies on. Care Compare is the federally-published quality view; the other three are the family-side view that a federal data set cannot replicate.

A note on the limits of any quality benchmark

Quality star ratings — at Care Compare or anywhere else — are imperfect summaries of complex care. They are useful in the same way that a credit score is useful: as an aggregate signal that is right more often than it is wrong, that is most useful when read against context, and that is dangerous when treated as a single decisive number.

Care Compare's value is greatest as a starting filter (eliminate the lowest-tier agencies, surface the agencies in your area with stable patient-experience scores) and a sanity check after the family has done its own diligence. It is least useful as a one-touch decision tool.

The directory is informational. We do not endorse specific agencies. The four-step verification framework above is the strongest version of the family-side work we know how to share.