Medicare-certified home health patients with an unreported dementia diagnosis are more likely to experience poor health outcomes.

That’s one of the key takeaways of a recent study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Researcher Julia Burgdorf, and her colleagues at the VNS Health Center for Home Care Policy and Research, also found that only 31% of patients diagnosed with dementia informed their home health provider about their diagnosis.  

Researchers examined over 1.3 million Medicare home health recipients based on the Medicare Beneficiary Summary File and Outcome and Assessment Information Set data to determine the frequency and potential outcomes of undisclosed dementia diagnoses.

Compared to home health patients with documented dementia diagnosis, those who kept their providers in the dark had longer lengths of stay, by three additional days, and were more likely to receive physical therapy and less likely to receive social work.

Additionally, home health patients with documented dementia diagnosis had longer hospital stays, higher emergency department utilization and lower odds of discharge to self-care.

“Results suggest that [home health] providers often lack pertinent information regarding patients’ dementia status, and patients with undocumented dementia more often experience acute care utilization,” researchers wrote.

Researchers also found that, of the more than 1.3 million home health patients in the U.S., 30% were diagnosed with dementia. Home-based care providers have increasingly specialized in this population in recent years.

Leaders at companies like Tender Rose Dementia Care Specialists, Pansy Homecare, Friendly Faces Senior Care and Full Bloom Memory Care have differentiated their business by training their staff to care for dementia patients and taking on challenging cases.

“What I’ve learned is, a lot of times when companies say they specialize in dementia care, they really specialize in what I would call dementia care light,” Jim Kimzey, CEO and co-founder of Full Bloom Memory Care, previously told Home Health Care News. “They’re able to handle the bread and butter, run-of-the-mill cases. We have deep expertise, and we’re able to handle the hardest cases.”