Hospitals at home poised to save money, keep the patient in familiar environment

Panelists at HIMSS22 discussed the benefits and challenges of implementing a hospital-at-home program.

Hospitals at home are poised to change the traditional in-hospital experience for participating patients. 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. 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, according to the white paper. However, if the challenges can be ironed out, the panelists agreed that patients and hospitals could benefit from a hospital-at-home system. We nearly universally see that patients want to be at home.