How we rate / methodology and sources

How we rate in-home care agencies, and where every fact comes from

This desk now publishes a ranking as well as records, which means two kinds of statement sit on the same page. This is where they are pulled apart: what we look up, what we judge, how the six agencies were chosen and ordered, who supports this site, and every file behind a number, with its pull date.

Two kinds of statement

FileA file statement is copied from a named source on a stated date: a Google rating and review count from the pull of 2026-09-12, a name search of a government file, or what an agency's own website says on the day we read it. If a file statement is wrong, the source wins and we correct the page.

EditorialAn editorial statement is our judgment: the order of the ranking and the label on each agency. It is marked as editorial wherever it appears, and nothing on the site presents it as a rating from Google, Medicare or the State of Missouri.

The checks we run on every named agency

Google listing: Rating and review count copied exactly from home_care_companies.json, pulled 2026-09-12. An agency with several offices has a listing for each, and we never add their counts together
Medicare-certified home health file: Name search of the 47 star-rated agencies with a metro street address in the CMS file, pulled 2026-09-10. A match means the agency, or that entity, provides skilled home health. No match is the expected result for a non-medical agency
Missouri certified home health directory: Name search of the DHSS directory, updated 2026-09-04. We report match or no match for ranked agencies only and reproduce no rows, for the licence reason recorded in source 6 below
The agency's own website: Read on 2026-09-12. We describe only what the page says, paraphrased unless it is in quotation marks, and we note when a page refused our reader. We do not repeat awards, client counts or claims we cannot see on the page
Business registration: Not reproduced. A Missouri Secretary of State search shows whether a legal entity exists; it is not a care licence. We tell families to run it themselves against the exact name on their agreement

A caregiver and an older woman fold towels together at a table in a bright bedroom — Homemaking is non-medical care, and the non-medical clarity criterion asks whether an agency says so plainly. Photo: New Plan Care Solutions.

How the six were chosen and ordered

Positions 1 to 6 are not scored. To qualify, a listing needed 20 or more Google reviews in the pull, an address in the St. Louis area, and a website of its own that we could read and that presents private-pay in-home care as its main service. Each agency appears once. Qualifying agencies are ordered by review count, most first, and the list stops at six. Those that met the review floor but were passed over before the sixth place was filled:

FreedomCare (St Charles, 4.8 from 408 reviews): a Medicaid consumer-directed program rather than an agency.
1st Choice Home Health Care, LLC (St. Louis, 4.9 from 93 reviews): its listing links to a social media page, not a website of its own that we could read.
Assistance Home Care, St Charles (4.8 from 88 reviews) and Ellisville (5.0 from 22 reviews): the same agency as #2, which is ranked once on its St. Louis listing.
A Better Life Health Care Network Inc (Florissant, 4.5 from 71 reviews): its site presents Missouri Medicaid consumer-directed services.
Gentle Hands Home Care (St. Louis, 4.9 from 54 reviews): its site leads with consumer-directed services.
Personal Care (Ferguson, 4.9 from 54 reviews): its site leads with Medicaid approval, with private pay second.
Right at Home (St Peters, 4.6 from 53 reviews): its site refused our reader on 2026-09-12, so we could not check what it says.
1st Choice Home Health Services (Florissant, 4.8 from 50 reviews): its site presents consumer-directed services and skilled nursing visits.
HomeTeam (Ballwin, 4.8 from 48 reviews): its site presents Medicaid-based consumer-directed services.
Griswold Care Pairing for St. Charles, St. Louis & Warren Counties (St Charles, 4.7 from 46 reviews): it works as a referral or pairing service rather than as the employer of the caregivers it places.

Being passed over is not a finding against any of them. Consumer-directed and Medicaid programs, for example, serve families this ranking is not built for. Every one of these listings still appears in the most-reviewed list or the highest-rated list, sorted by the numbers alone.

The five things we read for

Criterion	What we look for
Local ownership and accountability	A named owner who runs the agency locally and can be reached, rather than a decision-maker several offices away.
The first conversation	Whether a family can talk to a person before committing, and whether the first contact is about the family's situation rather than a script or a form that demands a phone number.
Plan flexibility	Whether support can start small, whether the plan is built with the family, and whether it changes when needs change.
Non-medical clarity	Whether the agency says plainly that its care is non-medical, and does not borrow the language of home health.
Family communication	Whether the agency says how families will hear from it, respects the contact method a family chooses, and has a record of doing so.

Why no agency carries a score

No agency on this site carries a numeric score from us. Each one carries a label instead, drawn from its Google listing and its own site, which anyone can check. A number would claim we had tested every agency's process to the same depth, and we have not.

What we will not publish

No invented reviews, ratings or review counts. No prices, response times, client counts, awards or quotes from other agencies that we cannot see on their own pages. No medical claims: every agency is described by what it says it does, and this desk covers non-medical care at home. No row in any public-record or data-sorted table is for sale.

Who supports this site

This site is supported by New Plan Care, a St. Louis in-home care company.

Corrections

If a figure here does not match its source, the source is right. If an agency's own site changes, or a description here no longer matches it, call (314) 405-0887 or use the request form and the page will be corrected or the entry withdrawn.

Sources, pull dates and licence status

Every file behind a number on this site. Sources 1 and 2 feed the ranking and lists; sources 3 to 9 are the desk's original public records.

1. Google Maps listings, St. Louis area home care

File: engine/data/home_care_companies.json, 162 rows
Collected: Google Maps searches for home care agencies in St. Louis, St. Charles, Chesterfield, Florissant, O'Fallon, Ballwin, Clayton, Kirkwood, Wentzville, Webster Groves and Arnold
Pulled: 2026-09-12
Fields used: Name, city, address, website, rating, review count
Used on: the ranking and the three lists
Caution: Google's category label says "home health care service" for almost every row. That label is Google's, not a licence category, and it is why the government file checks exist

2. The agencies' own websites

Read: 2026-09-12, the home page or local office page linked from each Google listing
Used for: What each ranked or passed-over agency says it does, and whether it describes its care as non-medical
Limits: A website can change the day after we read it. Descriptions are dated for that reason

3. CMS Home Health Care Agencies

Identifier: 6jpm-sxkc, file HH_Provider_Jul2026.csv
Publisher: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Provider Data Catalog
URL: https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/6jpm-sxkc
Release: July 2026, portal record issued 2026-05-27
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Work of the United States federal government, public domain
Used on: the star ratings file and the homepage counts
Extract: 50 agencies with a metro street address, of which 47 carry a quality of patient care star rating and 3 do not

4. CMS Home Health Care Patient Survey, HHCAHPS

Identifier: ccn4-8vby, file HHCAHPS_Provider_Jul2026.csv
Publisher: CMS Provider Data Catalog. Survey period 2025 Q1 to 2025 Q4
URL: https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/ccn4-8vby
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Join: On CMS Certification Number. 38 of the 47 star-rated metro agencies carry a survey summary star; the rest are shown as having none rather than as a zero
Used on: the survey stars file, which sorts on it, and as the second column of the star ratings file

5. CMS Home Health Care Zip Codes

Identifier: m5eg-upu5, file HH_Zip_Jul2026.csv
Publisher: CMS Provider Data Catalog
URL: https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/m5eg-upu5
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Used on: the zip code file, and folded into 15 counties on the county coverage file
Extract: 3,563 agency to zip rows across 262 metro zip codes, representing 81 distinct certification numbers reporting service somewhere in the metro

6. Missouri DHSS, Home Health In-State Certified Providers

Identifier: 3dcz-79am on data.mo.gov
Publisher: Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, Bureau of Home Care and Rehabilitative Standards
URL: https://data.mo.gov/dataset/Home-Health-In-State-Certified-Providers/3dcz-79am, with the department's own directory at health.mo.gov
Portal record updated: 2026-09-04
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Null. The portal record carries no machine readable licence statement. This is a public record published by a state agency, and this desk treats the underlying facts as public, but the absence of an explicit reuse licence is a real gap and is recorded here rather than papered over. Row-level republication of this file is limited on this site to counts and to describing what the directory contains. Individual agency rows from it are not reproduced as a table.
Extract: 39 distinct agencies listing at least one St. Louis metro Missouri county as a service area
Used on: the county counts file, as counts per county and a distribution of counties named per agency. No agency row is reproduced

7. Illinois IDPH, Home Services Agency Directory

Identifier: 9miz-pbzm on data.illinois.gov, 1,029 rows
Publisher: Illinois Department of Public Health
URL: https://data.illinois.gov/d/9miz-pbzm
Metadata read: 2026-09-10
Licence: Null. As with the Missouri portal, the dataset record carries no machine readable licence statement.
Status: HELD: A table of the currently unexpired licensed home services agencies in the Illinois metro east, filtered on expiry date at or after the pull date, is prepared and is not published. It is not linked from any page here and is not in the sitemap. This desk will not republish a state licensing file at row level, naming individual licensees, until a person has read the portal's terms of use and confirmed that doing so is permitted. That is a deliberate hold. The Illinois directory is still cited and linked as a place for families to search themselves, on the walkthrough and in the two-categories file, because linking to a public search tool raises none of the same questions as republishing its contents.

8. NPPES, the federal provider registry

Source: National Plan and Provider Enumeration System public API, enumeration type NPI-2, taxonomy 253Z00000X
URL: https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/search
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Method: One query per metro zip code, paged to exhaustion, deduplicated by NPI, filtered to records whose own practice-location zip is a metro zip and whose taxonomy list contains the code. City spelling variants of Saint normalised
Extract: 1,162 organisational registrations across 65 cities
Published as: Counts by city only, and the same counts added up by county on the county file. No provider names, no NPI numbers, no addresses. See the city file for why, and for what an NPI does not mean

9. Census Bureau, 2020 ZCTA to county relationship file

Publisher: United States Census Bureau
URL: https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/relationship-files.html
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Purpose: Six sources, six different ideas of place. This file fixes one boundary and applies it to all of them. The area is the St. Louis Missouri and Illinois metropolitan statistical area: the city of St. Louis and St. Louis, St. Charles, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and Warren counties in Missouri, and Madison, St. Clair, Monroe, Clinton, Bond, Macoupin, Calhoun and Jersey counties in Illinois. A zip code counts as metro if any of its land area falls inside one of the fifteen. Where a page names one county for a zip code that straddles a boundary, it names the county holding the largest share of that zip code's land
Consequence: A count filtered this way will not match a count someone else publishes using a looser or tighter St. Louis. Neither is wrong. The boundary is written down here so the difference is visible instead of mysterious

Who publishes this

Home Care Check is published by OwnersFirm. It has no say in which files this desk publishes or what they contain, and no other agency named on this site has any relationship with the publisher. This site carries no client-side analytics tag of any kind.