Five Years of HHS Home Health Care Evaluations: Using Evaluation to Change National Policy

In 1997, American Evaluation Association member George Grob, now retired from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and currently President of the Center for Public Program Evaluation, made a testimony on Medicare home health care fraud and abuse before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. The occasion was to announce the HHS Office of Inspector General's (OIG) release of two reports. The two reports that OIG profiled in the congressional testimony were part of a "large body of work including audits, investigations, inspections, and congressional testimony." In this article, the authors profile the HHS home health care evaluations, the political and organizational contexts in which they occurred, their short- and long-term effects, and their implications for evaluators' understanding of evaluation practice and the use of evaluation findings. The authors also present a narrative description of the evaluations and their background, follow it with an amalgamation of extensive evaluator-editor dialogue in the format of a single interview, and conclude with reflections on the case.