Hospital-at-home, accountable care and telehealth received boosts Tuesday during the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Health Care home health hearing.
During the hearing, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) highlighted the benefits of the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver, which began during the pandemic and is set to expire at the end of next year.
“Since its enactment, hospitals and health systems across … 34 states, including my own home state of Delaware, have utilized the hospital-at-home program to provide safe, high quality, hospital-level services in the homes of patients,” he said. “The hospital-at-home program has been a true success story. It has delivered positive outcomes, it has delivered a higher reported patient satisfaction, and I understand it has also delivered potential cost savings. Where I come from, that’s a win-win-win situation.”
Carper introduced the Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act with Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) that extended the waiver to 2024.
Other home care programs received recognition at the hearing Tuesday. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out the benefits of telehealth.
“Our Rhode Island experience through COVID was pretty illuminating about telehealth,” he said. There had been a huge row about whether telehealth made sense, whether it should be paid for … Telehealth proved itself very quickly and we leapt through what had a lot of barriers.”
He also gave a nod to accountable care organizations. Two primary care organizations in Rhode Island became ACOs, he said, and ramped up home health delivery, which has been successful.
William Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care and Hospice who testified at the hearing, agreed about the value of ACOs.
“Successful ACOs have relied upon home health services to their own financial business benefit, in addition to the patient benefit,” he said during the hearing. “And the learning from those ACOs is now being transmitted to other ACOs to manage care programs because it’s been ambitious to bring healthcare services to the home, but it’s been an underappreciated and underutilized benefit. So a lot of the learning that you’ve noted there is now being passed on to others to see that kind of benefit.”
