What I Learned From My Family’s Home Health Experience

COVID-19 has opened the floodgates for health care at home options. Public health emergency waivers are fast-tracking telehealth and hospital at home—which provides hospital-level care in patients’ homes—while infection concerns have driven more patients to home health following a hospitalization.

For patients, payers, and health policy professionals like me, the health care at home promise is tantalizing. In its ideal state, it would take fixed capital costs out of health care and redeploy them into person-centered care plans that include the diverse services and supports that individuals with complex care most need. It would also help patients and their families avoid the grueling and sometimes dangerous experience of an institutional setting.

But my recent experience managing home health and hospice for my father has given me insights into the perils that patients and their family caregivers could also face.