May 2, 2025

Welcome to the Moving Health Home newsletter!

In this monthly newsletter, you will find policy developments, research, and updates on how health care organizations are striving to shift more health care delivery into the home – meeting patient needs where they are and expanding access to quality health care.

Please send any news or events to rcheung@movinghealthhome.org for future inclusion in this newsletter.

Administration

Department of Veterans Affairs: VA Northeast Ohio Health Care System Expands Home-Based Care (4/21) - VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System is transforming Veteran care by delivering medical and support services to their homes. Through its Home-Based Primary Care program, the VA ensures Veterans who experience mobile hardships in medical centers receive high-quality healthcare from a dedicated team of professionals. This program brings together nurses, psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nutritionists, and speech and physical therapists to provide a comprehensive approach to care. This way, Veterans receive personalized healthcare tailored to their individual needs.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation of the Medicare Program Request for Information (4/11) - CMS released a request for information, which seeks comment on approaches and opportunities to streamline regulations and reduce burden on those participating in the Medicare program. This RFI supports the President’s deregulatory priority, and follows similar RFIs released by the OMB. This is an important opportunity for stakeholders to highlight areas for CMS to waive, modify or streamline existing regulatory requirements that are overly burdensome, redundant or can be automated or otherwise simplified. Comments are due June 10. 

Office of Management and Budget (OMB): Requestion for Information Deregulation (4/11) - The Office of Management and Budget released a request for information, which seeks proposals to rescind or replace regulations that are unnecessary, unlawful, unduly burdensome, or unsound. Comments should address the background of the rule and the reasons for the proposed rescission, with particular attention to regulations that are inconsistent with statutory text or the Constitution, where costs exceed benefits, or where the regulation is outdated or unnecessary. Comments are due May 12. 

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): RFK Jr.: I'm Fighting Chronic Disease (4/10) - On April 10, HHS Secretary Kennedy published an op-ed reviewing the Make America Healthy Again agenda. Moving Health Home is working on a Primary Care at Home for Seniors with Chronic Disease model, which would allow Medicare beneficiaries with chronic disease to receive care at home. 

CMS: Dr. Mehmet Oz Shares Vision for CMS (4/10) - Dr. Mehmet Oz became the 17th Administrator of CMS. Under his leadership, CMS aims to work to modernize Medicare, the Marketplaces and Medicaid, including:

• Empowering the American People with personalized solutions they can better manage their health and navigate the complex health care system. As a first step, CMS will implement the President’s Executive Order on Transparency to give Americans the information they need about costs.
• Equipping health care providers with better information about the patients they serve and holding them accountable for health outcomes, rather than unnecessary paperwork that distracts them from their mission. For example, CMS will work to streamline access to life saving treatments.
• Identifying and eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse to stop unscrupulous people who are stealing from vulnerable patients and taxpayers.
• Shifting the paradigm for health care from a system that focuses on sick care to one that fosters prevention, wellness, and chronic disease management. For example, CMS operates many programs that can be used to focused on improving holistic health outcomes.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ): Assisted Home Dialysis in the United States: New Interest in an Old Idea (4/8) - An AHRQ report reviewed home dialysis in the United States. The report found that early results of Medicare's End Stage Renal Disease Treatment Choice (ETC) did not result in increased home dialysis uptake, despite its modest increased reimbursement rate. Several reasons could explain the lack of uptake. Researchers recommend increasing the availability of dialysis assistance to allow patients who value convenience and comfort of home dialysis to purse the option. 

AHRQ: Summit to Address Emergency Department Boarding (3/27) - An AHRQ report found that creating public reporting frameworks, aligning payment structures and incentives, and broader adoption of inpatient bed managers are among the strategies experts are calling for to reduce emergency department boarding. Additional strategies included:

• Efforts to streamline discharges, such as discharge lounges, planned discharges and ensuring patients are discharged early in the day as often as possible.
• Establish public reporting and standards around ED boarding, including thresholds by hospital size and required reporting on capacity management plans and denied transfer requests.
• Revise payment incentives to reduce boarding, such as tying reimbursement to timely admission or adjusting CMS Conditions of Participation to require action on boarding.
• Among others.

Congress

House of Representatives: Fitzpatrick, Trahan Unveil Bipartisan Caring for Our Seniors Act to Expand Affordable Assisted Living and Rebuild the Long-Term Care Workforce (4/24) - On April 24, Reps. Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Trahan (D-MA) introduced the Caring for Our Seniors Act (H.R. 3000), which aims to address long-term care workforce shortages and increase access to and affordability of long-term care.

Senate: Legislation to Prevent Costly Falls (4/8) - Sens. King (I-ME) and Welch (D-VT) introduced the Home Accessibility Tax Credit Act (S.1315), which would provide a refundable credit for certain home accessibility improvements. Eligible home modifications would include zero-step entrances, ramps, widened doors and hallways, modified counters, bathroom accessibility improvements, and the installation, replacement, or modification of appliances to make them more accessible to individuals with a vision impairment. The list of approved modifications could be updated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Health and Human Services (HHS). Rep. Stevens (D-MI) introduced the companion legislation in the House (H.R. 2749).

Senate: Bipartisan Group of 60 Senators Introduce the Creating Opportunities Now for Necessary and Effective Care Technologies (CONNECT) for Health Act (4/3) - Sens. Schatz (D-HI), Wicker (R-MS), Warner (D-VA), Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Welch (D-VT) and Barrasso (R-WY) introduced the CONNECT for Health Act (S. 1261), which would expand coverage of telehealth services through Medicare, make COVID-19 telehealth flexibilities permanent, improve health outcomes, and make it easier for patients to receive care at home. The House companion is expected to be introduced later. 

Senate: Alleviating Barriers for Caregivers (ABC) Act (3/31) - Sens. Markey (D-MA), Capito (R-WV) and Reps. Cammack (R-FL), Magaziner (D-RI) introduced the Alleviating Barriers for Caregivers Act (H.R. 2491/ S. 1227), which would require the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Commissioner of Social Security to review and simplify the processes, procedures, forms, and communications for family caregivers to assist individuals in establishing eligibility for, enrolling in, and maintaining and utilizing coverage and benefits under the Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Social Security programs respectively. 

Research and Polling

Annals of Emergency Medicine: The Role of Emergency Medicine in Hospital-at-Home (4/24) - Recent policy changes and technological advancement have spurred growth in hospital-at-home programs across the United States. The role of emergency medicine in hospital-at-home programs has not been clearly defined. Emergency medicine should contribute to the design, implementation, and leadership of these programs, as experts in management of acute illness and patient disposition. Further growth of hospital-at-home is likely to have important implications for the practice of emergency medicine, prompting adaptation and innovation. Hospital-at-home can offer a novel strategy to address emergency department boarding.

NEJM Catalyst: Digitally Enabled Urgent Care at Home: Enhancing Patient Access, Operational Efficiency, and Care Delivery (4/16) - The University of California, Davis Health Urgent Care at Home (UCAH) program found, of the 815 patients visited at home by a mobile care team, 14% were escalated to the ER for treatment, highlighting the program’s ability to differentiate between cases suitable for home-based care and those requiring higher-acuity interventions. Findings suggest that digitally enabled urgent care models can be an effective enhancement to existing care pathways, helping to expand access for patients with mobility limitations, urgent but nonemergent conditions, and barriers to traditional outpatient services.

Current Geriatrics Reports: Home-Based Primary Care Aging in Place in 2025 (4/11) - Home-Based Primary Care (HBPC) supports over 2 million homebound Americans aged 65 and older, addressing barriers to traditional care. This review examined its benefits and found that it delivered holistic care for homebound individuals through interdisciplinary, patient-focused approaches. By integrating technology and behavioral health, it addresses complex needs, improves outcomes, and expands access to care for vulnerable populations.

Journal of the American Geriatrics Society: What Changed Your Mind? Influencers of Older Adults Changing Decisions About Aging-In-Place Versus Long-Term Care (4/11) - As individuals experience age-related changes, such as cognitive decline or hospitalizations, their ability to live independently at home may be impacted. Decision-making and planning are essential in order to support successful aging-in-place. Five overarching themes emerged that influenced fluctuating decision-making: personal health experience, health experience of a loved one, increased contemplation, social support network influences, and denying change.

Annual Review of Public Health: Long-Term Care Services and Supports Needed for Successful Aging-in-Place (4/10) - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published this study, which highlights the urgent need for an expanded infrastructure to support long-term care services (LTSS) and enable successful aging-in-place. Researchers found that although there has been a shift from institutional care such as nursing homes to home-based care, the infrastructure to support aging-in-place remains fragmented and underfunded. Technology plays an increasingly important role in enabling aging-in-place with innovations like telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and home-based care frameworks, such as those under hospital-at-home initiatives, promising to improve communication among patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Read more in the press release.

RAND: Strategies for Sustaining Emergency Care in the United States (4/7) - The viability of hospital-based emergency care in the United States is at risk, threatened by issues such as patients with increasingly complex needs and falling payments for physicians. Many of the problems facing emergency medicine are expanding in scale, including long emergency department wait times, boarding patients in emergency department beds, and a high amount of uncompensated care. The RAND study found that inpatient observation care, hospital-at-home and remote patient-monitoring programs, and emergency department critical care units can help address some of the challenges ER departments face. Recommendations included health care organizations and legislatures to invest in expanding primary care capacity and develop and implement strategies to address ED crowding.

Journal of American Geriatrics Society: Practice Standards for Acute Hospital Care at Home (3/29) - The HaH Users Group (HaHUG) developed national practice standards for HaH and assessed practice performance against those standards. Final practice standards included 31 standards in 7 domains: leadership; education and training; human resources management; quality and quality improvement; safe practice and environment; and clinical standards and protocols. The vast majority of HaH practices met or exceeded these standards by their own assessment.

Telemedicine and e-Health: Impact of a Large-Scale Remote Patient Monitoring Program on Hospitalization Reduction (3/24) - MHH member Michigan Medicine's Patient Monitoring at Home program found $12 million return on investment from avoided hospitalizations. Hospitalizations fell by 59 percent among patients in a remote patient monitoring program in the six months following their participation. Read more in the press release.

Learning Health Systems: Developing HeartSafe Home Intervention (3/23) - In the United States, only 8.2 percent of people treated for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in 2023 survived with good neurological function. The interval from the onset of cardiac arrest to the start of CPR and defibrillation is strongly associated with survival and neurologic recovery. Researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School identified factors to improving in-home OHCA response, targeting increasing capacity among family and friends. Based on the sessions, the researchers developed a HeartSafe Home intervention that aimed to prepare household members to respond to a cardiac arrest at home. 

News and Market Developments

DesignNews: Home Healthcare: IPS Supports Hospital-at-Home Project for Enhanced Patient Care (4/30) - Intelligent Product Solutions (IPS) is providing thought leadership on medical device design and manufacturing and will be collaborating with other Hospital-at-Home partners, helping to “define the technology and components needed to support the initiative.” 

Modern Healthcare: Remote Patient Monitoring’s Potential (4/30) - Remote patient monitoring could revolutionize home-based health care by keeping some patients out of the hospital. Elara Caring, Geisinger Health, AccentCare and others are deploying equipment in patients’ homes that allows them to remotely monitor the vital signs of people with acute or chronic conditions. The technology can help alert providers if patients' conditions worsen and keep them from bouncing back to the hospital.

Penn Today: The Reimagineers of Penn Medicine (4/28) - Two longtime Penn Medicine doctors who bring creativity and a collaborative spirit, along with a deep understanding of the health care system, are driving the concept of "anytime, anywhere" and connecting care across settings. They are, together and separately, working on projects such as moving health care out of the hospital and into the home when appropriate, building more robust systems for online scheduling and accessibility, and leveraging artificial intelligence to ease the burden on health care providers.

Modern Healthcare: Why Insurers May Want in on Mobile Integrated Healthcare (4/24) - UMass Memorial Health, Geisinger, Prisma Health and others are operating at-home care programs and say the service saves millions of dollars by preventing emergency room visits and rehospitalizations of chronically ill patients. While mobile integrated healthcare programs may help control the cost of delivering care to at-risk patients, most providers are not fully reimbursed for the service because Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance don’t typically cover care provided by paramedics that does not involve an ambulance trip to the hospital. Several bills introduced in states like Illinoi and Oregon would help. Congress is considering Medicare coverage as well. 

McKnights Home Care: Acute Home Care Partnership Reduces Readmissions, ED Use (4/24) - Since launching its Acute Care at Home program, in March 2024, Ochsner and myLaurel have reduced patients’ 30-day readmission rates by 49 percent, cut participants’ emergency department utilization by 33 percent and prevented 92 percent of initial inpatient admissions. The partnership also has generated high average patient satisfaction, reduced patients’ out-of-pocket health care costs by more than one third and freed up thousands of bed days for Ochsner hospitals, allowing the system more flexibility to care for patients.

Becker’s Health IT: Florida Health System Launches Hospital at Home (4/22) - Lakeland Regional Health launched a hospital-at-home program. In the first week, the health system has treated nine patients at home, discharging four of them. Florida has become a hub for hospital at home, with major health systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Rochester, Mayo Clinic and AdventHealth rolling out programs there.

Healthcare Innovation: Innovating to Improve the Quality of Post-Acute Home Health Care (4/17) - Home-based care has also become an integral part of the post-acute spectrum of patient care, as an appropriate option for Medicare members. The first step in improving the quality of post-acute home-based care is understanding population and home health trends to predict future health care service needs. Providing the right level of care for a patient’s particular acuity level helps maximize access to post-acute services for the entire patient population.

McKnights Home Care: Reimagine Care and MedStar Partner on Home-Centered Cancer Care (4/16) - Reimagine Care and MedStar Health announced a partnership on a pilot project to care for their patients going through cancer treatment. Reimagine’s collaboration with MedStar intends to “fundamentally enhance cancer care” in MedStar’s service area. Technology-enabled symptom management, monitoring and support services would allow partner providers to deliver cancer patients regardless of whether patients are in clinics or at home. This virtual-first approach helps patients better manage their symptoms.

Modern Healthcare: Hospital-at-Home, Emergency Medical Systems Vie for Paramedics (4/15) - Hospital-at-home and other home-based care programs have turned paramedics into hot commodities for health systems and ignited competition for their skills. Hospitals systems including Geisinger Health System, Allina Health and Sanford Health, in addition to home-based care providers WellBe Senior Medical, DispatchHealth and myLaurel are deploying paramedics into patients' homes to provide certain medical services that would otherwise be provided by registered nurses.

Mass General Brigham: Mass General Home Hospital Expands to Oncology Patients (4/15) - Mass General Brigham expanded its Home Hospital services by offering acute care at home for patients who have cancer. Home Hospital clinicians have been specially trained to support oncology patients and work closely with a team from the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute to ensure seamless coordination of care. The expansion allows the health system to continue its efforts to alleviate the capacity crisis at traditional brick-and-mortar facilities. 

Becker's Hospital Review: Providence Sets Sights on Home Care (4/9) - Providence, in partnership with Compassus, launched Providence at Home. Providence’s chief of community services, Terri Warren, spoke to Becker’s about what this partnership means for health system operations and what it signals to the healthcare industry at large. "It is so clear that as the big baby boomers age, and as the world we live in shifts, people want access to home-based care. They want easy access, easy communication and they expect nothing but the best in care, both from an experience and a clinical outcome standpoint."

MedCity News: The Next Evolution in Care Delivery: Key Barriers to Scaling In-Home Primary Care (4/8) - It is well documented that access to primary care in the U.S. is decreasing. In response, health care organizations are trying to move patients from higher-acuity settings, such as the ER or skilled nursing facilities, to lower-acuity settings, such as a patient’s home. "Housepitalist" will be the next evolution of primary care providers. They will need to function as a team leader as much as an individual contributor to serve patients in the home at scale.

Atrium Health: Atrium Health Levine Children’s Brings Hospital Care to the Home (4/8) - Building on Atrium Health’s growing hospital at home program for adult patients, Atrium Health Levine Children’s Hospital at Home is designed to provide team-based, multidisciplinary care for children who would otherwise require hospitalization. The innovative service would allow patients to receive high-quality medical care without the need for a traditional hospital stay, reducing the burden on families and freeing up hospital beds for critically ill pediatric patients.

Healthcare Innovation: Maribel Health CEO on Trends in Home-Based Care Model Adoption (4/2) - MHH member, Maribel Health designs and operate home-based clinical care models to help expand total health system capacity. Adam Groff, M.D., M.B.A., the company’s CEO, spoke with Healthcare Innovation about the growth of home-based care and the short-term extension of the acute hospital-at-home waiver by Congress. Maribel Health offers clinical workflows, operating capacity, training, automation, and technology to clinical teams to provide care outside hospitals or clinics.

Upcoming Events

June 9-11, Hospital@Home Leadership Summit, "Accelerate the Impact of Hospital at Home Nationwide." 

June 30-July 1, RISE, "The RISE of Home Care Summit." 

September 15-17, Home Health Care News, "FUTURE Conference." 

December 3-5, Hospital @ Home Leadership Summit, "Embracing the Future of Healthcare."

Please subscribe to this newsletter and send any news or events to rcheung@movinghealthhome.org for inclusion in this newsletter.