Sex-offender screening for home health agencies
Your caregivers work alone in a client’s home. Screen every aide against all 58 US registries at hire and on a recurring cadence — from a dashboard your office staff can run, or the API inside your onboarding flow.
No code needed — search from your dashboard, or integrate the full API when you’re ready.
The problem for home health agencies and private-duty operators
- Every visit puts a caregiver alone in a private home with a vulnerable client
- Families choose an agency on trust; one incident undoes years of referrals
- Aides and companions turn over quickly, and hiring can’t wait on slow checks
- Franchise networks need one consistent screen across every territory
Outcomes
- Give families a screening story you can stand behind
- Re-screen every active caregiver on a schedule
- Hold every office and franchisee to one standard
How Offendersearch helps
Screen at hire, in minutes
Office staff type a candidate’s name into the dashboard and get photographs, aliases, and the official registry record before the offer goes out — no IT involved.
Re-screen the active roster
Upload the caregiver roster as a CSV on your own cadence — monthly, quarterly, per contract — and every row runs as one stored search.
One standard across a franchise
Add teammates so every office runs the same check the same way, with a stored history of who was screened, when, and what came back.
What the law actually requires
Home health is the sector where the honest answer is least like the marketing. The care happens in a private home, unsupervised, with a vulnerable adult — the highest-risk configuration in the industry — and yet the federal Conditions of Participation are close to silent on screening. What governs is state law, payer contract and insurance, and knowing which of the three you are actually answering to changes what you should do.
| Jurisdiction | Citation | Applies to | What it requires |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | Fla. Stat. § 435.04 | Staff | Level 2 screening — which Florida applies across a range of health care roles — includes a search of the sexual predator and sexual offender registries of every state in which the employee resided during the preceding five years. |
| Federal | 42 CFR § 484.115 | Staff | The home health aide personnel requirement sets training and competency standards — and, notably, does not impose a criminal background or registry screening duty. |
Citations link to the primary text. This is background, not legal advice — obligations change, and your counsel is the right reader of your own facts.
And what it doesn’t
This is the correction worth making loudly, because the opposite is said constantly: the Medicare home health Conditions of Participation do not require you to run background checks on your aides. 42 CFR § 484.115 governs aide qualification through training and competency evaluation, not criminal history. Anyone telling you CMS mandates aide screening is mistaken. That does not make screening optional in practice — many states impose their own duty, most payers and franchisors require it by contract, and abuse-liability insurance frequently conditions cover on it. But you should know that your obligation almost certainly comes from your state, your contract or your insurer, and those are the documents to read.
Screening practices for home health agencies and private-duty operators
Find out which authority you are actually under
State licensure, payer contract and insurance carrier impose different duties with different scopes. Screening to satisfy an imagined federal rule tends to produce a policy that matches none of the three real ones.
Follow the aide’s residence history
Home care draws heavily on a mobile workforce. Florida’s five-year residence rule is the clearest statutory articulation of the general point: the search worth running is not bounded by your own state line.
Re-screen on a cadence, not on renewal
Aides often stay on a roster for years between credential events. A periodic sweep of the active roster catches what an at-hire check never will.
Screen the whole roster, including PRN and agency staff
Intermittent and contract caregivers reach the same homes as employees. A policy written around full-time hires leaves the most transient part of the workforce unscreened.
Questions from home health agencies and private-duty operators
Can our office staff run this without technical help?
Yes. The dashboard is a search box: type a name, get the people who match with photographs and official registry records. The first 25 searches are free, with no payment method needed to start.
How do we re-screen the whole roster?
Export your active caregivers and upload the file as a CSV. Each row runs as one search with its own result, and the whole run is stored — a ready-made record for your compliance file.
Does it catch a caregiver who registered in another state?
Yes. Every search covers all 58 US registries — every state, DC and the territories — so out-of-state history surfaces in the same search.
Is this a background check / consumer report?
No. Offendersearch is not a consumer reporting agency and results are not a consumer report; do not use them for FCRA-covered decisions without appropriate process.
Registry and criminal records on one key
Most home health agencies and private-duty operators need more than one check, and running two vendors means two integrations, two contracts and two invoices. Both run on the same account, the same key and the same response shape.
Sex offender registry
58 US registries — the 50 states, DC and the territories — continuously updated, with photographs, aliases, addresses and the official record citation on every match.
Criminal records
more than a thousand county, state and federal jurisdictions — county jail rosters, statewide prison systems, court records and warrants — with coverage in every US state, in the same scored, source-cited schema.
1,375
county jurisdictions in the criminal roster — the layer where most US matters begin, and the one thin vendors skip.
51
states with a live statewide prison system, for the post-conviction picture in the same call.
58
US sex offender registries, continuously updated — the check home health agencies and private-duty operators are most often required to run.
See what each state publishes, or the live list at /v1/criminal/sources.
Per check, with no floor underneath it
$0.15 a call, dropping to $0.11 for every call past 2,000 in a calendar month. No setup fee, no per-seat licence, no monthly minimum and no annual contract — so the price scales down with you as well as up.
| Checks / month | Cost | Per check |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $75.00 | $0.1500 |
| 5,000 | $630.00 | $0.1260 |
| 50,000 | $5,580.00 | $0.1116 |
A batch is billed per row, so bulk screening costs the same per person as a single lookup. Full pricing · screen a CSV without code.
Screen home health agencies and private-duty operators with one API
Your caregivers work alone in a client’s home. Screen every aide against all 58 US registries at hire and on a recurring cadence — from a dashboard your office staff can run, or the API inside your onboarding flow.