CMS is taking steps to provide care to patients outside a traditional hospital setting amid a rising number of COVID-19 hospitalizations across the country. These steps are building on CMS’s previous actions to expand the availability of telehealth, healthcare services that need to be provided outside a hospital setting while maintaining capacity to continue critical non-COVID-19 care.
To meet this need, CMS https://www.cms.gov is developing the Acute Hospital Care At Home program to provide eligible hospitals with unprecedented regulatory flexibilities to treat eligible patients in their homes.
The Acute Hospital Care at Home program is for beneficiaries who require acute inpatient admission to a hospital and who require at least daily rounding by a physician and a medical team monitoring their care needs on an ongoing basis.
The program requires participating hospitals to have appropriate screening before care at home can begin. The program is required to assess both medical and non-medical factors, including working utilities, assess physical barriers, and screen for domestic violence concerns.
Beneficiaries will only be admitted from ERs and inpatient hospital beds, plus an in-person physician evaluation is required prior to starting care at home. A registered nurse will evaluate each patient once daily either in person or remotely. Two in-person visits will occur daily by either registered nurses or mobile integrated health paramedics, based on the patient’s nursing plan and hospital policies.
Six health systems with extensive experience providing acute hospital care at home are being approved and include Brigham and Women’s Hospital ( Massachusetts), Huntsman Cancer Institute (Utah), MGH (Massachusetts), Mount Sinai Health System (New York City, Presbyterian Healthcare Services (New Mexico), and UnityPoint Health (Iowa). CMS is going to closely monitor the program by requiring the hospitals to report quality and safety data to CMS based on their prior experience with the Hospital At Home model.
Go to https://qualitynet.com.gov/acute-hospital-care-at-home which is an online portal set up to streamline the waiver process and enable hospitals and healthcare systems to submit the necessary information in order to participate.