An Overview of Home Health and Hospice Care Patients: 1996 National Home and Hospice Care Survey

Advance Data 297. The data presented in this report were collected through the 1996 National Home and Hospice Care Survey (NHHCS), a nationwide sample survey that was first conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics in 1992. The NHHCS is a segment of the long-term care component of the National Health Care Survey and was developed in response to the rapid growth in the number of home health and hospice care agencies throughout the United States. This growth led to a need for information on the availability and utilization of services offered by these agencies. The NHHCS collects information about the agencies that provide hospice and home health care services, their current patients, and their discharges.

Data Highlights:

During 1996 there were an estimated 2.5 million current patients and 8.2 million discharges from 13,500 home health and hospice care agencies in the United States.

The home health and hospice care patients and discharges tended to be 65 years of age and over, female, white, and married or widowed.

The most common diagnoses for home health care patients were diseases of the circulatory system and for hospice care patients, malignant neoplasms.

About a third of the home health care patients and about a fifth of the hospice care patients had a surgical or diagnostic procedure related to their admission for care.

The most common procedures for home health care patients were operations on the musculoskeletal system and for hospice care patients, miscellaneous diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

Keywords: National Home and Hospice Care Survey, long-term care, Current patients, discharges, diagnoses, surgical and diagnostic procedures

This page last reviewed January 11, 2007