New federal funds likely to spark additional growth in hospital-at-home programs across the US while creating need for clinical laboratories to serve these homebound patients
In one of the latest examples of health systems’ providing acute care to patients outside of traditional hospital settings, Orlando Health announced its launch of the Orlando Health Hospital Care at Home program serving central Florida.
According to an Orlando Health press release, “The Orlando Health program is the first in Central Florida to be approved for Medicare and Medicaid patients, with future plans to expand the service for patients with private insurance and at other Orlando Health locations. It is an extension of a federal initiative created during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to increase hospital capacity and maximize resources.”
Orlando Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system with 3,200 beds at 23 hospitals and emergency departments. It is the fourth largest employer in Central Florida with 4,500 physicians and 23,000 employees. Its Hospital Care at Home program serves patients who meet clinical criteria with 24/7 telehealth remote monitoring and virtual care from the Orlando Health Patient Care Hub. In-person nursing visits are also offered daily, according to Orlando Health.
“Orlando Health wanted to be able to provide a different level of care for its patients and give them a different opportunity to be cared for other than the brick-and-mortar of the hospital,” Linda Fitzpatrick (above), Assistant Vice President for Advanced Care at Orlando Health told Health News Florida. “We’ll have decreased infectious rates in their homes, decreased exposures. It is a healthier and happier place to be in order to heal.” Clinical laboratories in the Orlando area will have the opportunity to serve healthcare providers diagnosing patients in non-traditional healthcare settings. (Photo copyright: Orlando Sentinel.)
Lowering Costs and Avoiding In-hospital Infections, Medical Errors
Treating patients at home, even after inpatient visits, can save them money. At the same time, patients are more comfortable in their own homes and that contributes to faster recoveries.
“[We’ll be able to measure] heart rate, respiration, temperature, and blood pressure. We’ll also do video conferencing from that location with the patient. We’ll have nurses going to the patient’s home at least twice a day,” interventional cardiologist Rajesh Arvind Shah, MD, Senior Medical Director of Hospital Care at Home, Orlando Health, told Health News Florida.
Orlando Health patients can be safely treated in their homes for many conditions including:
According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), “many are seeing the hospital-at-home model as a promising approach to improve value. … This care delivery model has been shown to reduce costs, improve outcomes, and enhance the patient experience. In November 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched the Acute Hospital Care at Home program to provide hospitals expanded flexibility to care for patients in their homes.”
Hospital-in-the-Home (HITH) is considered by many experts to be safer for patients, as they are not exposed to nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections, falls, and medical errors. In its landmark “To Err is Human” report of 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that medical errors killed as many as 98,000 patients in hospitals annually.
And in “Australia’s Hospital-in-the-Home Care Model Demonstrates Major Cost Savings and Comparable Patient Outcomes,” we predicted that wider adoption of that country’s HITH model of patient care would directly affect pathologists and clinical laboratory managers who worked in Australia’s hospital laboratories. Having more HITH patients would increase the need to collect specimens in patient’s homes and transport them to a local clinical laboratory for testing, and, because they are central to the communities they serve, hospital-based medical laboratories would be well-positioned to provide this diagnostic testing.
New Federal Funds for HITH Programs
One recent impetus to create new HITH programs was the passing of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 (HR 2617). The federal bill includes two-year extensions of the telehealth waivers and Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCaH) individual waiver that got started during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of March 20, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) listed 123 healthcare systems and 277 hospitals in 37 states that had been approved to use the AHCaH wavier.
Now that federal funding for AHCaH waivers has been extended, more healthcare providers will likely start or expand existing HITH programs.
“I think [the renewed funding] is going to allow for additional programs to come online,” Stephen Parodi, MD, Executive Vice President External Affairs, Communications, and Brand, Permanente Federation; and Associate Executive Director, Permanente Medical Group, told Home Health Care News.
“For the next two years, there’s going to be a regulatory framework and approval for being able to move forward. It allows for the collection of more data, more information on quality, safety, and efficiency of these existing programs,” he added. Parodi also oversees Kaiser Permanente’s Care at Home program.
Labs without Walls
Clinical laboratories can play a major role in supporting HITH patients who require timely medical test results to manage health conditions and hospital recovery. Lab leaders may want to reach out to colleagues who are planning or expanding HITH programs now that federal funding has been renewed.
As the number of Hospital at Home programs increase, clinical laboratories will want to develop programs for collecting samples from patients where they live
Shortages of nurses and hospital staff, combined with pressure to lower the cost of care, are encouraging more institutions to implement hospital-in-the-home programs. One such project involves Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), which last November began a Hospital at Home (HaH) program that enables certain patients to receive hospital-level care in the comfort of their own homes. Clinical laboratories servicing these programs will need to develop specimen collection and testing services in support of these patients.
The OHSU program can provide healthcare for eight patients simultaneously, and it has treated more than 100 patients at home since its inception. Although this number is only a small segment of OHSU’s 576 bed capacity, it does affect the overall healthcare provided by the hospital.
Under the program, basic services, such as the monitoring of vital signs—as well as some clinical laboratory work and routine imaging studies—are performed in the patient’s home. Individuals are transported to OHSU for more complex imaging or other procedures.
“Every patient we have in Hospital at Home is one who is not waiting in the emergency room or a hallway for a bed to become available in the hospital,” said Matthias Merkel, MD, PhD (above), Senior Associate Chief Medical Officer, Capacity Management and Patient Flow at OHSU, in a press release. In the same way clinical laboratories support telehealth programs, medical laboratories will need procedures for collecting specimens and testing patients participating in Hospital at Home programs as well. (Photo copyright: Oregon Health and Science University.)
OHSU’s HaH program utilizes advances in technology to connect at-home patients with physicians and nurses around the clock via a smart tablet. In addition, participating patients receive real-time monitoring and at least two daily in-person visits from nurses and paramedics that have been contracted by OHSU.
“It’s a better experience for patients, plus it increases our system’s capacity to provide care for all the people who need it,” said Darren Malinoski, MD, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer and Professor of Surgery at OHSU in the press release. “It allows us to make good on our promise to take care of the state as best we can.”
The current eligibility criteria to participate in OHSU’s Hospital at Home program include:
Patient must be over the age of 18.
Patient’s primary residence must be within a 25-mile radius of the OHSU hospital.
Inpatient hospitalization is initially required.
Patient must have a diagnosis that can be managed remotely, such as COVID-19, pneumonia, cellulitis, congestive heart failure, urinary tract infections, or pyelonephritis.
Malinoski feels that OHSU’s HaH program is ready to expand. In fact, he is so confident in it he enrolled his own 83-year-old mother as one of its first patients. While undergoing treatment for lung cancer, a routine clinical checkup exposed evidence of toxicity in her blood. Typically, she would have been directly admitted to the hospital for monitoring, but instead she was entered into the HaH program.
“It was unbelievable,” stated Lesley Malinoski in the press release. “I had the feeling of being well taken care of. I was in my own home. I could cook, I could rest—anything I wanted and still have all this care.”
“They didn’t just come in and run out,” she continued. “I felt like a celebrity.”
HaH programs around the country were made possible through a federal waiver granted by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in November 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), “this care delivery model has been shown to reduce costs, improve outcomes, and enhance the patient experience.”
Prior to the waiver, there were only about two dozen hospitals across the US that had HaH programs. However, as of May 20, 2022, 227 hospitals in 35 states had received a HaH waiver from CMS. This number represents nearly 4% of all hospitals in the country, according to Health Affairs.
In “Two US Studies Show Home-based Hospital Care Lowers Costs while Improving Outcomes and Patient Satisfaction,” we reported on a hospital-based home care program that involved 323 patients at Presbyterian Healthcare Services in Albuquerque, N.M. We surmised that significant growth in the number of patients treated in home-based hospital care programs would directly affect hospital-based clinical laboratories and pathology groups. Among other things, it would reduce the volume of inpatient testing while increasing the number of outpatient/outreach specimens.
And in “Australia’s ‘Hospital in the Home’ Care Model Demonstrates Major Cost Savings and Comparable Patient Outcomes,” Dark Daily saw that wider adoption of that country’s Hospital in the Home (HITH) model of patient care would directly affect pathologists and clinical laboratory managers who worked in Australia’s hospital laboratories. We reported that more HITH patients would increase the need to collect specimens in patient’s homes and transport them to a local clinical laboratory for testing, and that because they are central to the communities they serve, hospital-based medical laboratories would be well-positioned to provide this diagnostic testing.
OHSU’s overall experience with their Hospital at Home program demonstrates that such a model can be a highly successful and cost-effective method of providing patient care. It is probable that in the future, more medical institutions will create similar programs in an effort to effectively serve as many patients as possible while ensuring shorter hospital stays and rendering better healthcare outcomes. As this happens, it will give hospital-based medical laboratories an opportunity to deliver value in home-based patient care.
