Home Care

PHILADELPHIA - The house call is staging a comeback.But the doctor visit won't be as your grandmother or mother or even you might remember it. The physician appearing at the door with a black bag to check on a sore throat or fever is a vestige of an era before most Americans had TV sets.The new vision involves a doctor working with a medical team to give routine care to an expanding legion of elderly patients whose illnesses can make it impossible to go downstairs, let alone to a physician's office.

Don't let the vintage sign hanging above Randy & Steve's The New General Store on Main Street in Ellicott City fool you. Everything inside is -- as their name suggests -- “new” but with an old-fashioned touch. After closing The Good Life Market on nearby Tonge Row and taking a two-year sabbatical in Madeira, Portugal, Randy Neely and his partner, Steve Archuleta, returned to downtown Ellicott City to open a store in the former location of Yates Market, which had been a Main Street mainstay for more than 100 years.

A home health care service operated by Johns Hopkins failed to accommodate an employee with breast cancer and later fired her, the U.S. agency that enforces job discrimination laws charged in a suit announced Friday. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Hopkins unfairly fired Ray Ellen Fisher, a registered nurse, who had been a case manager at Johns Hopkins Home Care Group Inc. since 2003. According to the complaint, Fisher was diagnosed in 2009 and began treatments.

Anne G. Karlsen, a registered nurse who had worked for the Baltimore County Health Department, died Jan. 25 of heart failure at Gilchrist Hospice Care. She was 86. Anne Bradford Grafflin was born in Baltimore and spent her early years on Wilson Street in Bolton Hill, before moving in 1934 to the Dixon Hill neighborhood in Mount Washington. After graduating from Western High School in 1945, she attended Baltimore Business College and later that year went to work as a mail sorter in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's downtown freight office.

Donald Kirson often wonders how it is that a company like his, which has between 50 and 60 children on ventilator units in their homes and another 800 people on oxygen, doesn't have a license or face inspection by state regulators.For his own satisfaction, Mr. Kirson signed up his home medical equipment company, Kirson Medical Equipment Co., for periodic reviews by the national Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations.He is one of those who would be in favor of a proposal being circulated by Maryland health planners to license home health companies and subject them to quality-control measures.

Once it was simple: You went to the hospital, you got better, and then you went home. But it's not that simple any more.Pressed by Medicare and insurance companies to cut costs, hospitals are discharging patients faster and forcing them to spend their convalescent time at home, rather than in the hospital.It's a problem, yes, but also an opportunity -- one that bigger hospitals are rushing to fill by jumping into the home health business themselves.Most bigger local hospital companies set up home health care subsidiaries by 1984, many of them racing to beat a state deadline that allowed hospitals to start home health operations without winning a certificate of need from the state.

Say the word hospital to 11-year old Carol Lena Cannistra and her generally sunny disposition is immediately shadowed by sadness.After 15 major operations and 14 bouts of pneumonia, Carol Lena gets depressed just thinking about hospitals. Even a visit for a routine checkup is a traumatic experience for the Edgewood girl.But lately, Carol Lena doesn't mind medical examinations and treatments.Carol Lena, who was born with multiple birth defects and is paralyzed from the waist down, is a patient of Johns Hopkins' Pediatrics at Home, a comprehensive home-care agency created months ago as part of the Johns Hopkins Home Care Group.

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- In a ruling hailed as a victory for the country's home child-care providers, the Internal Revenue Service yesterday said providers need not record the specific hours the rooms in their homes are used each day for child care when calculating business deductions.Advocates said the ruling is a reversal of a previous IRS position that panicked providers and even drove some out of business.The previous position, which surfaced in the audit of a home child-care provider in White Bear Lake, Minn.

Close to 200 protesters, most of them in wheelchairs, held a noon rally yesterday at the Inner Harbor on their two-week odyssey from Philadelphia to Washington to support disabled people who want to live at home rather than in nursing homes. The protesters, drawn from across the country, are traveling 144 miles from Philadelphia to Capitol Hill to build support for the Medicaid Community-Based Attendant Services and Supports Act, federal legislation that would require Medicaid to pay for home attendant care so that disabled people aren't unnecessarily forced into nursing homes.

When state nursing home inspectors made a surprise visit to the Long Green Center in Baltimore in May 1997, they found a lot to complain about.Their 17-page report on the facility at 115 E. Melrose Ave. cited multiple violations of state regulations, many in the treatment of a woman in her 90s who had died there little more than a month before.Despite the critical findings -- including improper medication, failing to treat bed sores, failing to notify her physician of "significantly abnormal laboratory results" and improperly administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation the day she died -- no one ever told the relatives of the woman or any of the other "victims" of poor care at the home, a legislative committee was told yesterday.

Many people think of nursing homes as places to go to die. But here in Maryland, skilled nursing and rehabilitation centers are in fact places people go to live. They are a big part of the solution to the state's health care challenges, providing quality and cost-effective transitional, rehab, long-term and high-acuity care to those in need. With the impending implementation of the Affordable Care Act in Maryland, we have an opportunity to identify and pilot ways in which Maryland's skilled nursing and rehabilitation centers can be essential to providing expanded care to people and families in need and deploying center‐based resources into the community for public health challenges.

Well, I'm pretty sure Mitt Romney's VP pick cost him the nun vote. Fourteen women religious embarked on a nine-state bus tour this summer to protest Congressman Paul Ryan's budget proposal - which he successfully pushed through the House before it was beaten back in the Senate - because of the drastic, some say catastrophic, cuts it would make to programs that benefit the poor, the sick and the hungry. Pretty much a nun's constituency. The nuns stopped the bus in Mr. Ryan's home town of Janesville, Wis., but he wasn't available to meet with them, although he has jousted with Jesuit priests at Georgetown University, who also criticized him, and the Catholic bishops, who did, too. Dissing nuns doesn't do much for the Republicans' problem with women.

About $14.3 million generated by the 2011 state alcohol tax will be used to expand long-term care services to frail seniors and adults with disabilities, officials said Wednesday. The money will mean the seniors and disabled people will be able to stay in their homes or communities, rather than moving to nursing homes or other facilities. "Keeping seniors and those with disabilities in their communities and closer to their families leads to a higher quality of life," said Lt. Governor Anthony G. Brown, in a statement.

Catonsville home care business named to top 100 in region Linda Cromwell, president and CEO of Catonsville-based Being There Senior Care, was among those selected for the 2012 Top Minority Business Enterprise Award. Cromwell was among the 100 women and minority business owners in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the District of Columbia honored during a May 4 ceremony at the University of Maryland University College. She was also among the top 100 women and minority business owners in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the District of Columbia for 2009.

Either County Councilman David Marks and county Chief of Staff Don Mohler are untruthful or they are sadly misinformed about the Baltimore County budget ("Balto. Co. Council poised to adopt 'bare-bones budget,'" May 17). The county is laying off the entire staff of the Medicaid Waiver Program. This is a program committed to keeping the elderly who qualify for nursing home care in their own homes or those of relatives. Instead of retaining the current staff, the case management responsibilities will be farmed out to temp agencies.

Connie and Nancy, my best friends since the seventh grade, and I were chatting on a kind of cross-country speakerphone conference call - catching up on jobs, husbands, kids and, sadly, mothers in nursing homes. Connie's mother is in terrific physical health - for 92 - but her mind has left the building. Nancy's mother's mind is still sharp, but her body has quit on her. Connie's mother doesn't know her. Nancy's mother knows very well where she is, and how unhappy she is. We changed the subject to talk about our next girlfriend getaway, but I dragged the conversation back to the tough topic of aging.

WASHINGTON -- Hospitals and other health care providers who responded to demands for more rural health clinics, hospices and health care in the home for Medicare patients say they are stymied in offering these services because they cannot get approval from federal regulators.Because of budget cuts, federal and state officials say, they have a huge, growing backlog of health care providers awaiting certification to participate in Medicare.Matters will only worsen, they say, as Republicans in Congress cut the budget for such regulatory activity, while encouraging doctors and hospitals to form new health plans to serve Medicare patients.

State lawmakers from Howard County say they're pushing the state to shift spending from senior institutionalized care to programs that allow residents to remain in their homes as long as possible. Several delegates said at a community meeting last week that they would discuss the matter with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Joined by County Executive Ken Ulman and County Councilwoman Courtney Watson, the lawmakers also agreed to look for ways to create more youth conservation jobs in a program that will manage storm-water runoff.

State lawmakers from Howard County say they're pushing the state to shift spending from senior institutionalized care to programs that allow residents to remain in their homes as long as possible. Several delegates said at a community meeting last week that they would discuss the matter with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Joined by County Executive Ken Ulman and County Councilwoman Courtney Watson, the lawmakers also agreed to look for ways to create more youth conservation jobs in a program that will manage storm-water runoff.

When the Obama administration recently backed off a long-term insurance program that was part of the law to overhaul health care, we all lost. The so-called CLASS Act, which even supporters acknowledge had design flaws, would have allowed workers to voluntarily buy a long-term care policy regardless of their health. The benefit wasn't huge, but it might have been enough to allow some seniors to remain in their homes. And it was better than nothing — which is what most people have now. But as it turned out, the program wasn't financially sustainable and was dropped before it ever launched.