Home care: what a physician needs to know.

When elderly patients might benefit from home care, a key question is whether Medicare will pay for it. We describe what physicians can do to avoid the pitfalls in qualifying appropriate patients for Medicare's Home Health Services and hospice programs, and the basic features of these two programs. We also describe the experience and methods used in prototype programs that provide home-based hospital-level care, and that revive a supposedly lost art: physician house calls.