Home Health Services

Baystate Home Health has a team of highly skilled, licensed, registered nurses who provide compassionate medical care. Our nursing staff performs a comprehensive assessment to determine the best plan of care for each individual. Our services include:

• Home infusion therapy
• Managing new or chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, heart failure, or lung disease
• Medication administration and management
• Teach dietary needs and restrictions
• Wound, catheter or ostomy care

Physical Therapy

Physical therapy helps patients regain independence with mobility. Qualified and licensed physical therapists focus their evaluation and treatment to help patients:

• Improve mobility after a knee or hip replacement, cardiac or other surgery
• Improve balance and coordination for safe ambulation
• Develop home exercise programs to safely increase strength and range of motion and prevent falls
• Better manage specific conditions like lymphedema, functional limitations due to stroke, vestibular deficits

Occupational Therapy

Occupational therapy ensures patients are as independent as possible with all daily activities of living. An occupational therapist will:

• Recommend accommodations to your home to help ensure a safe and supportive environment
• Provide equipment and training for greater independence with self care
• Assess cognition and provide intervention
• Teach energy conservation strategies for patients with chronic disease

Speech Language Pathology

Licensed speech-language pathologists specialize in the evaluation and treatment of patients with:

• Cognitive and communication disorders
• Voice disorders
• Problems with swallowing

Medical social workers address the social and emotional needs of patients about issues relating to their illnesses or injuries. The medical social worker provides you and your family with:

• Counseling and coordination of community support
• Help with solutions to financial, social, and emotional concerns
• Identification of available state and local resources

Home health aides provide a vital role in making sure our patients are safe and comfortable in the home. They provide assistance with services essential to independent living.

• Ambulatory activities and safety measures
• Bathing and dressing
• Meal assistance
• Personal care

Baystate Home Health provides telehealth monitoring to eligible patients. Regular telephone contact and health monitoring in between scheduled nursing visits enhances the quality of care and helps reduce your chance of re-hospitalization.

With the approval of the patient, a specially trained staff member will place a tele-monitoring unit in the home and provide education to the patient to communicate with trusted health professionals about their care.

HOME CARE ADMISSION CRITERIA

• Patient needs skilled health care — nursing, physical therapy or speech therapy.
• Patient needs part-time care on an intermittent basis.
• The attending physician will sign the initial plan of care.

Medicare and most other insurance plans also require that the patient be homebound (see below). As of January 2011, Medicare also requires that the attending physician has had a Face-to-Face Encounter with the patient either:

• 90 days prior to the start of home care services or
• Within 30 days after the start of care and that the face-to-face was related to the primary reason for home care.

GUIDE TO HOMEBOUND STATUS

Most insurance plans, including Medicare, require a patient who is receiving home health care to be "homebound." This does not mean that they are bed bound!

Consider:

• Does the patient have trouble getting to the physician's office and require someone to accompany him or her?
• Does leaving the home require "considerable and taxing effort" for the patient?
• Does the patient require assistance (human and/or a device such as a walker or cane) to leave home?
• Are most absences from home due to medical reasons?
• When leaving home for non-medical reasons, are the absences "infrequent and for short duration," such as attending religious services or beauty salon visits?

Contact

To make a home health care referral:

• Call 413-798-6698
• Download, complete and fax the BHH Referral Fax Form to 888-207-3106 or 413-794-6475.