Hospital at Home

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:05 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: Hospital level care at home is getting a boost across the country, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Let’s say you needed to be hospitalized but you were given the option to receive your care at home rather than a hospital. So-called ‘hospital at home’ programs are growing by leaps and bounds nationally. Bruce Leff, a gerontologist and expert in this area at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Leff: A lot of the patients that come into hospital at home are patients that are getting diverted from the emergency room and are going directly home. Covid created a strong incentive for hospital at home programs to start to transfer people out of the hospital early. They’re still going to need hospital level care so the hospital has to be a partner in this. The hospital really, truly has to not want to fill a bed, either because we’re in a capacity situation, and don’t want to invest more to build more beds because it costs about, depending on where you live in the United States, two to five million dollars to capitalize a hospital bed.  :33

Leff says as Medicare examines reimbursement he expects more and more such programs to open. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.