Records desk / verification walkthrough
How to check any home health agency in five federal lookups
If a company tells you it is a Medicare-certified home health agency, that claim is checkable in public files you can open yourself. This walkthrough uses five federal lookups, in order, for a named agency in the St. Louis metro. It does not replace the mixed state-and-federal five lookups already on this desk. It answers a narrower question: is this organisation a certified home health agency, and what does the federal file currently say about it.
Before you start, get two things from the agency: its exact legal entity name, and, if it will give you one, its CMS Certification Number. Trading names and website names often differ from the name on the certification. A search on the wrong string returns nothing and proves nothing. If the agency will not tell you the legal name on its own paperwork, stop there.
1. Medicare Care Compare
Open Medicare Care Compare. Search the legal name, then the city. Confirm the CMS Certification Number if you were given one. Read the quality of patient care star, the patient survey star, and the measure-level detail behind both. Certified home health agencies hold a CMS certification number and appear in this tool. If the agency claims certification and does not appear under any spelling of its name, the claim is wrong and you should ask why it was made.
Proves Medicare certification, the certification number, the current star ratings, and the underlying quality measures as CMS publishes them for the public.
Proves nothing about non-medical hours the same company may also sell you, nothing about the individual clinician who will walk into the house, and nothing about price. Medicare does not certify long-term personal care or homemaking on their own.
2. The CMS home health provider file
Care Compare is the public face of a downloadable file. The Provider Data Catalog dataset Home Health Care Agencies 6jpm-sxkc, file HH_Provider_Jul2026.csv, is the source this desk copied on 2026-09-10. Filtered to agencies with a street address inside the fifteen county St. Louis metro, it returns 50 agencies, of which 47 carry a numeric quality of patient care star and 3 do not. This desk republishes the 47 in the star ratings file. The 3 with no star in this release are excluded from that table rather than shown as zero.
Search the file, or this desk's copy of it, for the legal name and the certification number. Match city and ownership type against the paperwork you were given. The quality star on this file is a single value from 1.0 to 5.0 in half-star steps, computed by CMS from agency assessment and claims data. This desk does not compute it, adjust it, or weight it.
Proves the agency is in the federal certified-provider file for this release, with an address, a certification number, an ownership type, and, for 47 of the 50 metro-addressed agencies, a quality star.
Proves nothing about agencies based outside the metro that still report serving a zip code here. The service-area file, lookup four below, is the file for that question. 81 distinct certification numbers report service somewhere in the metro. Counting by street address and counting by reported service area are two different questions.
3. The CMS patient survey file
A second federal file holds the other star. The Home Health Care Patient Survey (HHCAHPS) ccn4-8vby joins to the provider file on CMS Certification Number. In the July 2026 release, 38 of the 47 star-rated metro agencies carry a survey summary star. The other 9 are shown on this desk as having none rather than as a zero. The survey period stated on the CMS record is 2025 Q1 to 2025 Q4. This desk sorts that star on the survey stars file, and never blends it into the quality star.
If the agency you are checking is one of the 9 with no survey star, that is a volume and response rule on the HHCAHPS site, not a hidden zero. Read it that way.
4. The CMS zip service-area file
Certification and a star still do not tell you whether the agency reports serving the street where your relative lives. That is a different federal file: Home Health Care Zip Codes m5eg-upu5. In this metro it holds 3,563 agency-to-zip rows across 262 zip codes. This desk copies those counts on the zip code file and folds them into fifteen counties on the county coverage file, using the Census Bureau 2020 ZCTA to county relationship file to hold the boundary still.
Look up the zip code of the house, then confirm the agency's certification number appears for that zip. The most-covered zip on this desk has 34 certified agencies reporting service. Two metro zips are served by exactly one. Those counts are reported service area, not available capacity. An agency can name a zip and still have no open slot this week.
5. The federal provider registry, NPPES
Last, confirm identity in the NPI Registry search. Choose the organisation search, enter the legal name and the state, and read the national provider identifier, the practice location, and the taxonomy codes the organisation selected. A certified home health agency will usually show 251E00000X. The non-medical taxonomy 253Z00000X, In Home Supportive Care, is a different enumeration. Some organisations carry both because they operate both kinds of work. Ask which legal entity, and which taxonomy, belongs to the hours you are being quoted.
Proves a federal registration exists under a name and address you can compare against the paperwork, with a taxonomy the organisation chose for itself.
Proves nothing about quality, competence, licensure, insurance, bonding, or background checks. There is no vetting behind an NPI. Use it to confirm identity, never as a credential.
What these five still cannot answer
The five lookups verify certification, identity, reported service area, and the two federal stars. They do not answer who will actually arrive, what happens when that person is sick, whether caregivers are employees or contractors, or what the work costs. No file on this desk contains a rate. Ask those questions in writing. If you are doing this because someone just left a hospital, the companion guide at After the Hospital STL covers the first week home, which is a different problem from verifying the agency's federal record.
If the quote in your hand is not for certified home health at all, these five lookups will correctly return little or nothing, and that is not a finding against the company. It is a finding that you are in the other category. For that work, use the two-categories file and the hiring walkthrough at Hire Caregiver STL.
A useful extra, not one of the five federal lookups, is the Missouri DHSS directory and the same records on data.mo.gov. In the current file, 39 agencies list at least one St. Louis metro Missouri county as a service area. This desk publishes those counts by county, not the rows, because the portal licence field is null. Run the directory search yourself for a named agency.
New Plan Care
New Plan Care pays to appear on this page. It is a client of this site's publisher, OwnersFirm. It is not a Medicare-certified home health agency, so the five federal lookups above will not return a quality star, a survey star, or a CMS certification number for it. That absence is the expected result for a provider of non-medical care at home. Put the paid placement through the same identity checks you would use on anyone else.
Call New Plan Care at (314) 405-0887.
The five federal links, in one place
- Medicare Care Compare.
- CMS Provider Data Catalog, Home Health Care Agencies 6jpm-sxkc, July 2026 release, pulled 2026-09-10.
- CMS Provider Data Catalog, Home Health Care Patient Survey (HHCAHPS) ccn4-8vby, pulled 2026-09-10.
- CMS Provider Data Catalog, Home Health Care Zip Codes m5eg-upu5, pulled 2026-09-10.
- NPPES NPI Registry.
This walkthrough describes how to verify a certified home health agency against public federal files. It is not medical advice and not legal advice, and it does not tell you what kind of care a person needs.