National home health care spending grew the slowest among all major health-related categories in March, according to a new report by healthcare consulting firm Altarum.
Home health care spending grew at a rate of 6.4% year-over-year in March, lagging behind categories such as hospital care (7.9%), physician services (7.5%) and nursing home care (7.1%). This marks a shift from previous Altarum reports, which had consistently shown home health leading U.S. health spending growth for several consecutive months.
As a dollar amount, Altarum estimated national home health spending to be about $158.8 billion in March, or roughly 3.1% of national health spending. Leaders in this category were hospital care at about $1.5 trillion and physician services at $1 trillion.
Prices for home health care services also experienced a recent slowdown. Altarum’s pricing statistics drew on data from April, rather than March. In April, home health prices grew by about 2.5% year-over-year, compared to average price growth of 4.4% in April 2023 and 2.3% in April 2022. The Health Care Price Index rose by 2.8% in April 2024, according to the report.
Despite the slowdown in spending, home health experienced robust utilization and employment growth in April. Home health care services added almost 14,000 jobs that month, or 10.1% job growth compared to March, bringing total home health employment up to about 1.7 million. The healthcare industry as a whole added 56,200 jobs in April, which accounted for 32% of all jobs economy-wide.
Healthcare wages also grew by 3.3% year-over-year in April, compared to 4.2% wage growth in non-healthcare industries.
And home health care utilization rates rose by 3.2% in March. Utilization rate growth leaders included durable medical equipment, which rose 7.4% compared to the prior month, and nursing home care, which rose by 6.7% compared to the prior month.
