Are You Ready for US News & World Report's New Best Home Health Agency Report?

Increased transparency is coming

McKnight’s Home Care has announced that in the first quarter of 2026, US News and World Report will publish its inaugural Best Home Health report, which will rate each agency using CMS quality measures and patient experience surveys. They state, “US News continually tracks what information is available to consumers to help them navigate crucial healthcare decisions such as selecting their healthcare providers,” he said. “Given those two factors — the rising importance of home health, and the dearth of information readily available to patients and their families — we felt US News needed to develop these ratings to help inform those consumers.”

Today, most home health agencies are rated “in the middle” with 3 or 3½ stars, out of a possible 5 stars, being the average rating across these seven measures:

Three Home Care Needs, One Solution

Here are three ways QliqSOFT’s Quincy Digital Communication Platform can help you improve both patient satisfaction and patient experience scores:

1. Timely initiation of patient care

Efficient referral management and timely patient onboarding remain critical challenges in home health care. As agencies navigate a landscape marked by complex clinical workflows, changing regulatory mandates, and increasingly tech-savvy and demanding patients, legacy processes often slow down the journey from referral to first visit. Manual intake forms, time-consuming phone calls, and fragmented communication between providers, patients, and families burden staff and patients. These bottlenecks can not only affect care coordination and patient safety but also threaten home health organizations’ ability to maximize census and deliver high-quality outcomes.​

Referral conversions in home health hinge on timely, accurate, and compassionate onboarding. Manual entry errors, incomplete documentation, and delays in communicating with referrers or patients can stall clinical handoffs. Traditional phone-based outreach means staff spend hours leaving messages, waiting for callbacks, and troubleshooting paperwork fulfillment. 

Platforms like QliqSOFT’s Quincy for Home Health address these pain points directly, transforming slow, manual processes into streamlined digital experiences. Instead of relying solely on phone-based processes, agencies can leverage secure, automated digital outreach to engage patients the moment a referral arrives. QliqSOFT’s HIPAA-compliant messaging system puts proactive communication at scale—staff no longer need to expend time on repeated phone calls or wait for message returns. With virtual assistants and secure texting, onboarding instructions, consents, forms, and appointment reminders can be pushed instantly to patients and families in simple, accessible language.​

2. Prevent admissions

In Home Care, compassion and dignity are the cornerstones of supporting patients. Between-visit monitoring embodies this spirit of gentle vigilance, offering continuous attention without intruding on the peace patients and families seek. This approach transcends traditional periodic visits by utilizing remote monitoring and telehealth technologies to closely monitor patients’ symptoms and comfort levels between scheduled in-person visits.

Home Care patients often experience fluctuating symptoms such as pain, breathlessness, or nausea that can intensify unexpectedly. Between-visit monitoring, aimed at patients and/or caregivers, provides clinicians with information to recognize and respond to changes, preventing unnecessary emergency visits and hospitalizations that can disturb a patient's comfort and dignity. It enables clinicians to identify the types of needs, determine when to reach out, and access increased support from the agency. It also allows for timely medication adjustments, enhanced symptom management, and immediate emotional support through virtual visits or calls, which is invaluable when physical visits are limited by patient mobility or geographic barriers.

This continuous connection also provides reassurance to patients and their families. Knowing that skilled caregivers are available to them helps ease anxiety, promotes trust, and supports patient-centered care that aligns with individual goals and values. It extends the care team's presence into the home in a respectful, unobtrusive way, ensuring that care adapts fluidly as needs evolve.

Through gentle vigilance enabled by Quincy for Home Health, remote screening becomes a seamless continuum—supporting quality of life, honoring personal dignity, and providing comfort when it matters most.

3. Increase your patient satisfaction and online review scores

At a time when individuals research everything from restaurants to hotels online before making decisions, healthcare is experiencing a profound transformation, shifting from patients relying solely on physician recommendations to increasingly relying on online reviews and third-party ratings. Online reviews really matter:

• 77% of patients use online reviews as their first step in finding a new provider.
• When shopping for healthcare, consumers are weighing an average of 5.5 reviews and visiting three different websites before making a decision.
• They also influence where your organization will land. For Google Search, it’s estimated that around 13% of a search ranking is tied to online reviews, which can secure a coveted first-page position.

To respond to this reality, agencies face a dual challenge: staff-driven outreach is too resource-intensive to scale, and the most frustrated individuals disproportionately shape patient voices. While satisfied patients often remain silent, a single negative experience can quickly dominate online reviews and distort a reputation. The answer lies in shifting from reactive, human-limited processes to automated, intelligent engagement.

Quincy Patient Reviews by QliqSOFT is a healthcare reputation platform that helps clinics, hospitals, and home health organizations increase the total volume of authentic patient reviews — without bias or filtering. Using predictive intelligence, it automatically engages every patient after care to collect feedback, enhance trust, and deliver actionable insights to improve patient experience and brand credibility.

With solutions like Quincy Patient Reviews, clinics can seamlessly capture feedback at every touchpoint through SMS or email, instantly analyze sentiment, and direct patients down the right path, encouraging happy patients to share reviews publicly while routing concerns internally for immediate resolution. This not only ensures that every patient is heard but also empowers clinics to scale reputation management far beyond staff limitations, creating a more accurate, more balanced reflection of the care they deliver.

Home health agencies are entering a new era of transparency as US News & World Report prepares to launch its inaugural Best Home Health ratings in early 2026, leveraging robust CMS quality measures and direct patient experience surveys. This initiative marks a pivotal moment in healthcare, empowering patients, and families with trusted, accessible data to guide crucial care decisions—a move long overdue in the evolving landscape of home-based services. 

Forward-thinking agencies will recognize that the path to superior ratings and reputational strength hinges on not just compliance, but genuine innovation in care delivery. Solutions like QliqSOFT’s Quincy Digital Communication Platform exemplify this approach, enabling agencies to overcome the bottlenecks of manual intake, inefficient outreach, and fragmented communications. By prioritizing timely, compassionate digital engagement and continuous monitoring between visits, agencies can not only boost their CMS scores, enhance patient satisfaction, and drive authentic, balanced online reviews. 

In a world where patient voices and third-party rankings increasingly shape consumer choices, leading home health organizations must champion technology and workflow redesign that amplify dignity, trust, and measurable quality at every touchpoint.