Home health
Skilled nursing and therapy at home, usually after a hospital stay and usually paid by Medicare. The category families most often think they are buying when they are buying something else.
Official source the real list is public and we send you to it
Two lists, and which one applies depends on who is paying
There are two answers to "which home health agencies are there", and they are different lists of different lengths. Nobody tells families this, and it changes what you may choose from.
| Oregon Health Authority | Medicare | |
|---|---|---|
| What the list is | Every agency licensed by the state to operate here | Every agency certified to bill Medicare |
| How many | 62 | 51 |
| Carries quality data | No — it is a license roster | Yes: a star rating for quality of patient care, and a patient survey |
| Use it when | You are paying, or checking that an agency is licensed at all | Medicare is paying, which is most of the time |
The eleven-agency gap is the finding. Those are agencies you can hire and that will not appear on Medicare's own comparison site — so a family who searches only Care Compare, which is the site everyone is sent to, is looking at a list that is complete for the money Medicare spends and incomplete for the money you spend. In the other direction, if Medicare is paying, the certified list is the only one that matters, because Medicare will not pay an agency it has not certified.
The agency on the discharge list is a suggestion
Home health is usually arranged in the last hour of a hospital stay, by a discharge planner, from a printed list. Two things about that list are worth knowing while you are holding it:
- You may choose a different agency. The list is the agencies the hospital works with, which is not the same as the agencies that are best or nearest.
- The agency may be owned by the hospital or by the same health system. Frequently true, frequently fine, and worth knowing because it explains the shape of the list.
The discharge planner is also, for free, one of the most useful people in this entire process — they know local capacity in a way no website does. Both things are true at once.
The service-area question nobody asks
A home health agency is not a place you go. It is a service that comes to you, so its address answers the wrong question — the question is whether it covers your parent's street. Agencies define their coverage by ZIP code, not by distance, and an agency twenty minutes away may not serve her block. Medicare publishes those service areas: for Oregon it is just under two thousand agency-to-ZIP pairs. Ask about the specific address, not about the town.
What it will and will not do
The domain page has Medicare's own list of what the home health benefit excludes, and it is worth reading twice, because the exclusions are where families' expectations actually break. The short version: this benefit is designed around recovering from something. It is measured in weeks, it requires that your parent be homebound and need part-time skilled care, and it explicitly does not cover the thing most families want — someone there for a few hours a day so she can stay in her house. That is a different service with a different payer, and confusing the two is the most expensive mistake on this page.
Before you choose one, the questions worth asking — including the one about nights and weekends, which is the answer that decides what the experience is actually like.
Where this comes from
- Oregon Health Authority — licensed home health agencies — read 2026-08-12.
- CMS Provider Data Catalog — Home Health Care Agencies — read 2026-08-12.
- Medicare — Home health services coverage — read 2026-08-10.