Hospitals at home are poised to change the traditional in-hospital experience for participating patients. Instead of getting care in a facility, the care comes to the patient using a hybrid of technology and in-home care, Mobi Health News reports.
“Some people, when they are talking about hospitals at home, are talking about a post-discharge hospitalization … where I think we want to get to with hospital at home is replacing the entire hospital stay. There are patients that would be in-patient in the hospital, but instead, we are doing that entire stay at home,” Nathan Starr, lead at TeleHospitalist at Intermountain Health, said during a panel at HIMSS22.
According to a HIMSS white paper, in-home hospitalizations save between $5,000 and $7,000 per episode. Increasingly, health systems are offering hospital-at-home services. According to the paper, 82 health systems and 186 hospitals across 33 states are cleared for Medicare’s Acute Care at Home program. This program allows for CMS to reimburse the hospital-at-home service at in-patient rates, if patients meet certain criteria for admissions, under the Public Health Emergency waiver. Read more.
