MnCHOICES: the county assessment, and how to ask for one.
Almost every public route to paying for care at home in Minnesota runs through an assessment, and almost nobody is told how to start one. It is not something a provider arranges for you, and you do not need a referral to ask.
What it is
A structured assessment of what help somebody needs with daily life, carried out in person. It is how the state establishes whether someone meets the level of care that the home and community-based waivers require, and it produces the plan that everything after it hangs off.
Who carries it out
Your county lead agency, or a tribal agency, or your health plan if you are enrolled in one. It is the county you live in rather than the county a provider is based in. For a Saint Paul address that is Ramsey County; Woodbury, Cottage Grove and Stillwater are Washington County.
How to ask for one
- Call your county's aging and disability intake line and say you would like a long-term care consultation or a MnCHOICES assessment.
- You can ask for yourself, or for somebody else with their permission.
- You do not need a doctor's referral, a diagnosis in hand, or a provider lined up first.
- Ask, on that call, roughly how long the wait currently is, and plan around the answer rather than around an average.
Starting this early costs nothing and buys time. It is the step families most often discover after they needed it.
What to have ready
An assessor will ask what a normal day looks like, what has become difficult, what help is already happening and who is providing it, what the home is like, and what the person wants. Nothing needs to be perfect, but somebody who knows the day-to-day should be there.
The questions in our checklist for a hospital discharge cover most of the same ground, and are a reasonable way to get your own notes in order first.
What it decides, and what it does not
It decides eligibility and, where a programme applies, a budget. It does not choose a provider for you. Picking who actually comes to the house is a separate decision and it stays yours, which is worth knowing because the two get run together constantly.
Questions families ask
- Do we have to accept whatever it recommends?
- The determination is the county's. What you do with it, including who provides the care and whether you use a programme at all, is not.
- Can we arrange care while we wait?
- Private pay does not wait for an assessment, and many families bridge that way. Ask any provider what happens to the arrangement if a public programme starts later.
- Does Abloom arrange the assessment?
- No. It is the county's, and it stays independent of whichever provider you eventually choose. We can tell you who to call.
Two calls, in this order
The county, to start the assessment, and then providers, to find out what care would cost and what they can actually accept. Doing the first one early is the part that is hard to get back.
Checked against Minnesota DHS and the federal sources on 13 September 2026. Programme rules change; the linked pages are the authority, not this one.