Hospital-at-Home Programs Seek to Sustain Momentum Built During Pandemic

During the pandemic, approximately 100 health systems took advantage of a waiver from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to provide acute care services in the home setting. But the waiver ends whenever the public health emergency does, so that investment in innovation is threatened. A 16-member group called the Advanced Care at Home Coalition is seeking to get a legislative extension of the waiver in the short term to ensure that there is stability and predictability around the investments that hospitals are making. “A second goal is to develop a permanent strategy,” says Mara McDermott, the coalition’s executive director. “We're learning a lot from the data and from the experience on the ground about what the best practices are and what might better serve patients, so it would be using that data and information from the waiver to inform a permanent solution.”