Posted on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 9:16 PM
People are starting to believe that the U.S. health care system is shifting away from hospitals into the people’s homes. Proof of this statement can be found in New York City, where Mount Sinai Health Network is in the frontline of providing hospital-level care for patients at home.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been testing several alternative payment methods since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.
Due to this three-year project, some patients are receiving the option from Mount Sinai emergency departments to be technically admitted to the hospital but receive their care at home, which allows trained doctors and clinicians to visit them at their homes.
Since the project just entered its last year under the CMS grant, Mount Sinai Health Network President Arthur Klein, M.D., spoke with Home Health Care News about their dedication in serving more patients at home through the “re-engineered hospital” of the future.
HHCN: What patients qualify for hospital-level care at home, and how many have participated?
Klein: At Sinai, we have a project to look at our capabilities to provide safe care at home for a group of patients who would otherwise be hospitalized, under the medical supervision of our Department of Geriatrics’ Visiting Doctor program, one of the oldest and largest in the country.
In the hospital at home program, we have a group of patients who show up at our ER, who have a relatively low-acuity diagnosis that otherwise would have mandated their admission to the hospital. Cellulitis, CHF [congestive heart failure] tune-up, rehydration, et cetera.
When these patients are evaluated in our ER and our doctors deem them worthy of admission, they’re offered the opportunity to be treated at home. That means they get prescribed a number of doctor visits, nurse visits, all the medical devices they may need—IV fluids, poles, pulse oximeter, and so on—and they go home.
We have treated over 150 patients in this program.
For the full conversation, click here.
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