About RateMyHomeHealth
Why this site exists
Our analysis of CMS Home Health Compare data shows that most Medicare patients in any given service area receive care from a home health agency that is not the highest-rated option available to them. That is not because families are careless. It is because nobody shows them the comparison. The data exists — CMS publishes quality ratings for every Medicare-certified agency quarterly — but the referral system has no incentive to surface it.
The referral pipeline for home health is broken in three specific ways:
- Discharge planners control referrals. When a patient leaves the hospital, the discharge planner hands them a short list of home health agencies. There is no requirement that these be the highest-rated agencies. Often, they are simply the agencies with the strongest sales reps or the fastest intake process.
- Private equity ownership is reshaping the industry. The American Antitrust Institute has documented how PE consolidation in home health affects patient care and competition. When agencies are acquired and rolled into portfolio companies, the incentive structure shifts from patient outcomes to margin optimization.
- Existing directories are paid by agencies. Many referral platforms earn fees from the agencies they recommend. When the agency is the customer, the patient is the product.
RateMyHomeHealth was built to cut through all of that. We show CMS government quality data for every Medicare-certified home health agency in the country. We do not accept money from agencies, we do not sell referrals, and we do not suppress bad scores.
What the data includes
- Quality of Patient Care star rating — The CMS overall quality rating (1-5 stars) based on clinical outcome measures
- CAHPS patient experience scores — Survey results from actual patients about their experience with the agency, including communication, responsiveness, and whether they would recommend the agency
- Hospitalization and ER rates — How often patients end up back in the hospital or emergency room during a home health episode. Some agencies in the same city have readmission rates three times higher than others
- Functional improvement measures — Whether patients actually got better during care: ambulation, bed transferring, bathing, medication management
- Quality issue flags — CMS flags agencies with data quality or performance issues. We display these prominently
How we update
CMS publishes updated Home Health Compare data on a quarterly cycle. We import the latest dataset after each release, so the quality ratings, patient experience scores, and outcome measures on this site are never more than one quarter behind the current CMS release.
What we don't do
- Accept referral fees or commissions from home health agencies
- Sell "featured" placement that affects search ranking
- Suppress poor quality ratings or high hospitalization rates
- Require agencies to "claim" a listing in order to appear in results
- Let discharge planners or agency sales teams influence what families see
For agency operators
If you operate a listed agency and want to add your website, update contact information, or respond publicly to your CMS data, you can do so through our Agency Portal. This does not affect your ranking or rating — those are determined solely by CMS data.
Who runs this site
RateMyHomeHealth is run by a small team with backgrounds in data journalism, healthcare information, and consumer advocacy. None of us work in home health or have financial ties to any agency or referral network. We built this because the data was publicly available and no one was making it usable for ordinary families making urgent care decisions.
We are not a nonprofit. We are not affiliated with CMS, Medicare, or any government agency. We are an independent directory that runs on the same CMS data any member of the public can download from data.cms.gov — we just do the work of processing it and making it searchable.
Our only revenue comes from agency portal subscriptions (verified badge and availability features). That revenue does not affect rankings. Agencies cannot pay to appear above others. See our Methodology for exactly how we process and display the data.
About the Founder
Abdullah Orani created RateMyHomeHealth after helping an aging parent transition to home health care and struggling to compare agencies on quality metrics that actually matter. The referral pipeline handed his family a short list with no context — no outcome data, no hospitalization rates, no patient satisfaction scores. The CMS data existed but was inaccessible to ordinary families. He built this tool to make that data usable for anyone navigating the same decision.