How to Switch Home Care Agencies in Pennsylvania Without Losing Your Services

If your family is receiving Medicaid home care through Community HealthChoices in Pennsylvania and the agency isn’t meeting your needs, you can switch — and you should. Your loved one’s care plan, authorized hours, and MCO enrollment stay intact. The only thing that changes is who provides the services.

Here’s how the switch works within Pennsylvania’s CHC system, and what to watch for during the transition.

How to Initiate the Switch

Contact your MCO’s service coordinator — the person who manages your loved one’s care plan.  Tell them you want to change your home care agency. You don’t need to provide a detailed reason, though explaining what went wrong helps the coordinator recommend a better-fitting alternative.

The service coordinator will provide a list of credentialed home care agencies in your area and facilitate the transition. If you’ve already identified CareChoice as the agency you want to switch to, tell the coordinator directly: “I want to transfer my services to CareChoice.”

Switching to Participant-Directed Services

Here’s where the switch becomes transformative for many Pennsylvania families. If your current agency provides traditional staffed care — they send their own employees to your home — and your family would prefer to have a relative serve as the paid caregiver, switching agencies is the perfect opportunity to activate Participant-Directed Services.

Tell the service coordinator: “I want to switch to PDS and hire a family member as my caregiver through Agency with Choice.” This isn’t just changing who delivers the care — it’s changing the entire care model. Your loved one chooses their own caregiver (a daughter, son, sibling, grandchild, or other qualifying relative), and that person becomes a paid W-2 employee earning $13.50 to $18.00 per hour.

In our experience at CareChoice, this is the most common scenario we see: a family has been receiving agency care through CHC, they learn about PDS, and they switch to CareChoice specifically to activate the paid family caregiver pathway. The authorized hours don’t change.
The care plan doesn’t change. What changes is that the care is now provided by someone the family trusts, and that person is getting paid.

What Transfers and What Doesn’t

Transfers with you:  Your care plan, your authorized services, your authorized hours, your MCO enrollment, your service coordinator (they stay the same regardless of which agency provide scare), and your Medicaid eligibility.

Doesn’t transfer:  The specific employment relationship with the old agency’s staff. If you were receiving agency-staffed care, those aides stay with the old agency. If you were using PDS and a family member was employed through the old agency’s AWC, the family caregiver’s employment transfers to the new AWC organization — but this requires re-enrollment(background checks are typically still valid, but employment paperwork needs to be reprocessed).

In our experience, the AWC-to-AWC transfer is the step that takes the most time — typically two to three weeks for administrative processing. CareChoice works to expedite this so the family caregiver’s paychecks resume as quickly as possible. During the transition, the family member can continue providing care; the administrative transfer doesn’t require a pause in actual caregiving.

What We See When Families Switch to CareChoice

The families who come to CareChoice from other agencies consistently cite the same set of issues with their previous provider.

“Nobody answered when I called.”  The most common complaint by far. Families describe leaving voicemails that go unreturned for days or weeks, being transferred repeatedly, and never having a consistent point of contact. At CareChoice, every family has a dedicated coordinator with a direct line.

“The paychecks were always wrong.”  Late deposits, incorrect amounts, missing withholdings.  For family caregivers relying on their PDS income, payroll problems aren’t an inconvenience —they’re a financial crisis. CareChoice’s AWC processing is built for reliability, and when issues occur, they’re resolved within days, not weeks.

“They never told us about PDS.”  This one is the most frustrating — families who spent months or years receiving care from agency strangers without anyone mentioning that a family member could have been the caregiver and gotten paid for it. CareChoice leads with PDS because we believe every family deserves to know the option exists.

“They didn’t understand our community.”  Language barriers, cultural insensitivity, or a general disconnect between the agency’s staff and the family’s needs. CareChoice serves every neighborhood in Philadelphia, the surrounding counties, and Pittsburgh— and we build our teams to reflect the communities we serve.

You Don’t Have to Start Over

If your loved one already has an active CHC care plan with authorized hours, CareChoice doesn’t need you to go through the entire enrollment process from scratch. We step in as the new provider, the care plan carries over, and services continue. The switch is a provider change, not a program re-enrollment.

Ready to switch? → Contact CareChoice in Pennsylvania

Written by Jailah Johnson, Community Engagement Coordinator — Philadelphia | CareChoice