Moving Health Home Explores The Evolution of Home-Based Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Coalition for Home-Based Care Releases New Whitepaper
Care on your own terms.
It’s a concept easy enough to understand and yet if we’ve witnessed anything since COVID-19 emerged in early 2020 it’s that our nation’s healthcare centers were wholly unprepared for a pandemic that demands the home-based care of countless patients. Ultimately, the future growth of home-based care is contingent on state and federal policymakers becoming more permanently flexible to home-based case modalities.
When we focus on the patient and what the patient needs in terms of monitoring, care, and communication, it becomes apparent that many patients who currently require hospitalization could have their needs met with greater comfort, quality, and efficiency in their homes. However, for this better future to be realized, health providers and technology companies need to create new workflows, technologies, and solutions. But that will not be enough; federal and state regulatory bodies need to modify current regulations to enable solutions that benefit patients and their families. Third-party payers will also need to create mechanisms that reward innovative home-based solutions while protecting against fraud, waste, and abuse in a less controlled environment.
It’s this evolution of home-based care that serves as the focus of a recent whitepaper by Moving Health Home (MHH), a coalition made up of stakeholders working to change federal and state policy to enable the home to be a clinical site of care. Based on key findings from interviews with public health experts at Landmark Health, Dispatch Health, Contessa Health, Ascension and Advocate Aurora Health, the report dives into how home-based care has transformed over the course of the pandemic so far. More specifically, the whitepaper lays out four main takeaways, including;
- Home-Based Care Encompasses a lot More than Home Health — Care in the home is no longer limited to traditional home health services and exists on a spectrum of intensity and type of services offered.
- Organizations with Experience Providing Home-Based Care Were Well-Positioned to Respond to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) — While many organizations quickly adopted to the pandemic, models that succeeded most rapidly typically leveraged existing home-based care programs and infrastructure.
- Home-Based Care Models Boost Patient Satisfaction, Improve Quality, and Reduce Costs — Beyond addressing capacity and caregiver fatigue issues, home-based care models have demonstrated the ability to improve quality, boost patient satisfaction, and reduce costs.
- Regulatory Flexibility is Essential to Success — The pandemic demonstrated that regulatory flexibilities are critical to fully enable care delivery in the home.
Though there are tremendous opportunities for care in the home going forward, the report finds that certain key barriers could limit broader adoption of home-based care solutions, such as 1) an uncertain regulatory environments in a post-PHE world, 2) overly restrictive requirements for hospital and home programs, and 3) significant variability in provider requirements across states.
We at Inflect Health recognize that care in the home contributes to health equity, fosters trust and communication between healthcare providers and patients, removes institutional barriers and improves accommodations for the sick. We’re motivated by the belief that healthcare professionals should be empowered to meet patients wherever they are, on their own terms, and are hopeful recent policy changes will signal an increase in home-based care.
For more information about Moving Health Home’s effort to advance home-based care policy be sure to visit the Moving Health Home website, join their newsletter and download the full whitepaper here.
