In-home care advocacy group Moving Health Home recently penned a letter urging Congress to include a five-year extension for the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver in the March government funding package. The letter directly addresses Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of […] The post Nearly 100 Organizations Push Congress To Extend Hospital-at-Home Program appeared first on Home Health Care News.
In-home care advocacy group Moving Health Home recently penned a letter urging Congress to include a five-year extension for the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver in the March government funding package.
The letter directly addresses Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Additionally, the letter was signed by almost 100 stakeholders, including AARP, BrightStar Care, DispatchHealth, Home Care Association of America, Medically Home, Optum and more.
While the letter acknowledges that the waiver has already been, temporarily, extended to March, the stakeholders at Moving Health Home believe that an additional five-year extension would help the program take root and advance patient care.
“The AHCAH program has the rare combination of lower spending, shorter lengths of stay, high patient and caregiver satisfaction, and high quality,” Moving Health Home wrote in the letter. “It deploys innovative technology and a workforce eager to treat patients where they live.”
In 2020, CMS introduced the Acute Hospital Care At Home waiver program as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The program enabled providers to receive reimbursement for delivering hospital-level care in the home at a time when capacity was a major pain point for hospitals and health systems.
Creating this reimbursement mechanism, through the waiver, addressed one of the biggest barriers to widespread implementation of the hospital-at-home model across the country.
Since 2020, 358 hospitals across 137 health systems in 39 states have been approved for the waiver program.
In the letter, Moving Health Home cites the hospital-at-home model’s ability to lower spending and shorten length of stay.
“Americans want home to be the center of their health. Federal flexibilities such as the AHCAH waiver allowed hospitals to do just that,” the organization wrote. “Another extension of the waiver effectively builds the bridge from demonstration to a more permanent model by giving more certainty to those hospitals currently on the sidelines waiting for regulatory clarity. The evidence is mounting, and another extension will continue the progress and expand participation.”
Moving Health Home also pointed to a study which found that the mean cost was lower for
hospital-at-home care, at $5,081, than for acute hospital care, at $7,480.
Another study, highlighted in the letter, found that costs for hospital-at-home patients were 19% lower.
The post Nearly 100 Organizations Push Congress To Extend Hospital-at-Home Program appeared first on Home Health Care News.
