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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2305
igaa057.2305
Abstracts
Session 6000 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in High-Quality Home Health Use Among Persons With Dementia
Fashaw Shekinah  Thomas Kali  
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”666 666
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Prior research suggests minorities and racially-diverse neighborhoods have decreased access to high-quality hospitals, physicians, and nursing homes. It is not clear how this varies for persons with dementia (PWD) and home health agencies (HHAs). With the Medicare enrollment file, linked to the home health OASIS, the American Community Survey, and Home Health Compare, we examine the influence of individual’s race/ethnicity, as well as the racial/ethnic composition of neighborhoods, on the likelihood of high quality HHA use among PWD in 2016. Minority PWD receiving home health are significantly less likely to use high-quality HHAs than their white counterparts (33% vs 39%, respectively). PWD using HHA in predominantly minority neighborhoods are less likely to use high-quality HHAs compared to PWD in predominantly white neighborhoods (31% vs 40%, respectively). This study is the first to examine racial disparities in the use of HH for PWD. Policy and practice implications will be discussed.