ICF/IID means intermediate care facility for individuals with intellectual disabilities. It is an optional Medicaid institutional benefit. The facility provides 24-hour care and what federal rules call active treatment: a continuous program of training, health services, and support, coordinated by a QIDP.
The name used to match an older federal label. Statutes changed the wording to intellectual disability, and the benefit's name followed. You will still see ICF/ID, or an older abbreviation, in documents nobody has revised. They mean this facility. They do not mean a nursing home, and they do not mean every group residence a state licenses.
A group home funded by a waiver can look residential and still not be an ICF/IID. The waiver home is a community service. The ICF/IID is the institution whose level of care the waiver uses as an eligibility screen. People meet that level of care and then, if a slot exists, get community services instead. Some people live in the facility itself. Both arrangements are Medicaid. The staff rules, the money, and the rights process are not the same.
Size varies. Some ICF/IID programs are large campuses. Some are small homes that still operate under the institutional benefit. Counting beds, or counting houses, does not tell you which benefit is paying. The license and the claim do.
Habilitation is the community word for teaching skills. Active treatment is the facility word for a related obligation, with a QIDP responsible for holding it together. When a story says a state is downsizing institutions, this is the benefit those beds usually sit in, and the waiver is where the state says the services went.
The waiver that is supposed to replace a bed has to have a slot, a provider, and a rate that can staff the alternative. A facility census and a waiver waiting list are the two numbers to put next to each other.