Hospital executives are making the push to move more care, specifically recovery rooms and exams, out of the hospital and into patient homes, to potentially save money and improve finances as the country continues to move out of the pandemic, Politico reported May 11.
And Congress is supporting these efforts by introducing legislation that would expand at-home care and to allow Medicare to continue funding telehealth.
Here are five findings from the report:
1. John Couris, president and CEO of Florida Health Sciences Center in Tampa, Fla., told the publication bipartisan support from Congress is a game changer and a silver lining that came out of the pandemic. "We're all trying to diversify our revenue streams," he said.
2. A bill was approved by a U.S. House committee on May 8 that would extend the ability for health system's to provide telehealth and hospital-at-home care. U.S. Sens. Tom Carper and Marco Rubio have introduced a bill that would extend rules approved during the pandemic that permit at-home care government reimbursement. Mr. Carper also plans to introduce a measure to make offerings for hospital-at-home programs a permanent solution, Politico reported.
3. Many of the healthcare leaders pushing the move to more remote care come from hospitals that can financially support this movement, which could create a larger divide between "the haves and have-notes," the publication reported. However, the goal is to have at-home patient recovery be less costly for patients than inpatient care.
4. Although at-home care is widely supported by both hospital and political leaders, there remains a divide on how much the services should cost. Hospitals are pushing to charge "the high rates inpatients and their insurers pay," the publication said, regardless of if care has shifted to at-home or an outside clinic where care is offered at a less expensive rate. Lawmakers, on the other hand, are looking to cut hospital rates where the services are given by exploring site-neutral policies to reduce reimbursements paid to physicians who work out of their office. "The reimbursement is getting tougher," Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health, told the publication. "Everybody's trying to figure out how to improve operational efficiency."
5. Expanded at-home care comes with adapting to newly developed technologies, with many providers increasing their investment into telehealth and remote care technologies over the last few years. "Almost everybody's thinking about how to make adjustments to embrace new technology," Jiang Li, CEO of Vivalink, a remote care company, told Politico. "This trend definitely will continue — it will continue on a global scale, not just the U.S."
"As hospitals and health systems across the nation continue juggling increasing patient volumes and staffing challenges, this bottleneck in throughput is harming patient experience and creating barriers to access for patients who urgently require inpatient care," Mr. Couris said in a statement shared with Becker's. "Now, we have a critical opportunity before us to innovate our way out of this problem. We have seen firsthand how hospital care at home is not only effective, but significantly improves patient outcomes. Data from our own hospital-at-home program, TGH at Home, reveals that patients enrolled have lower readmission rates, on average, when compared with patients of similar diagnoses, ages and acuity in a traditional hospital setting. Given the proven success of this model and its untapped potential to alleviate some of the systemic challenges our industry faces, it’s time to expand patient eligibility."
To read the full Politico article, click here.
Editor's note: This story has been updated as of May 17 at 10:40 a.m. CT.