CMS Announces Flexibilities for JAHF-supported Hospital at Home Model Amid COVID-19 Surge
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced
new flexibilities for hospital at home programs amid the COVID-19 surge. JAHF helped develop the Hospital at Home model in the 1990s through a grant to Johns Hopkins University and has provided ongoing support for the model's study and dissemination.
The press release notes that CMS has "outlined unprecedented comprehensive steps to increase the capacity of the American health care system to provide care to patients outside a traditional hospital setting amid a rising number of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) hospitalizations across the country...Today [November 25, 2020], CMS is expanding on this effort by executing an innovative Acute Hospital Care At Home program, providing eligible hospitals with unprecedented regulatory flexibilities to treat eligible patients in their homes."
To support these efforts, CMS has launched an online portal to streamline the waiver request process and allow hospitals and healthcare systems to submit the necessary information to ensure they meet the program’s criteria to participate.
Mount Sinai Health System was one of the earliest adopters of the concept, and one of the first to prove that it works - both clinical outcomes and patient experiences were vastly improved with hospitalization at home care. A 2018 study on outcomes was funded by a Health Care Innovation Award from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and augmented by JAHF.
To read the CMS press release, click here.
To read Mount Sinai's press release on the announcement, click here.
To go to the Hospital at Home Users Group website, click here.
To go to the JAMA Internal Medicine paper, click here.
To learn more about JAHF's most recent support of Hospital at Home, click here.