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September 14, 2026Journal of Applied GerontologyOpen Access

The Impact of Hurricane Harvey on Home Health Care Delivery for Medicare Beneficiaries

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Authors

CLChih‐Ying LiMTMd Ibrahim TahashilderYKYong-Fang Kuo

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Overview

Interrupted time series reveals significant drops in home health services among Medicare beneficiaries after Hurricane Harvey, highlighting the need for stronger disaster preparedness regulations.

Key Points

  • To evaluate the immediate and sustained impact of Hurricane Harvey on home health nursing and therapy service delivery among Medicare beneficiaries in Texas.
  • Linked 2017–2018 patient-level Medicare home health claims with Federal Emergency Management Agency county-level disaster declarations for 142,416 beneficiaries.
  • Conducted segmented interrupted time-series analyses to estimate monthly level and trend changes in home health utilization between affected and non-affected counties.
  • Home health nursing use dropped 16% immediately following the hurricane and continued to decline by 0% to 2% throughout the post-Harvey observation period in affected counties, with comparable declines observed in non-affected counties.
  • Home health therapy visits exhibited similar but smaller overall decreases, whereas beneficiaries with the lowest functional baseline experienced significantly larger immediate reductions in therapy utilization in affected versus non-affected counties.

Cite This Study

Li et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6aa7b32d0926e14a848b1e47https://doi.org/10.1177/07334648261454481
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