Health Care Organizations Unite To Advance Hospital-at-home Programs With Implementation Framework

A coalition of health care leaders has come together to launch a comprehensive framework aimed at helping health systems and providers develop and scale hospital-at-home programs.

The Connected Health Collaborative Community (CHcc), along with the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) and Consumer Technology Association (CTA), launched a step-by-step set of resources designed to help guide health systems and providers through the process of launching and optimizing a hospital-at-home program, called the blueprint.

Among the inaugural members is Vivalink, a provider of digital health solutions, which announced its collaboration with the program on Tuesday.

“By releasing this blueprint with these partners, we’re providing a critical framework to help health systems scale and sustain HaH programs, even as uncertainty around reimbursement looms,” Jiang Li, CEO of Vivalink, told Home Health Care News in a statement. “It equips hospitals with the technical and operational guidance needed to implement and prove the viability of these programs.”

Hospital-at-home programs are popular with patients and supported by research as a viable method to decrease costs and readmissions while maintaining or improving quality and safety. Still, the Acute Hospital Care at Home program, launched in 2020, could expire within the year. The looming expiration date and several short-term extensions have caused some providers and health systems to hesitate when considering engaging with the hospital-at-home model.

Earlier this month, lawmakers introduced legislation that would expand the waiver program through 2030. The blueprint strengthens the case for long-term reimbursement through the proposed legislation by helping hospitals prove that hospital-at-home models are viable, Li said.

“If the goal is to keep advancing healthcare equity and innovation, especially for aging populations and rural patients, we need a clear path forward,” Li said. “This blueprint helps ensure that providers aren’t left scrambling, regardless of where the waiver lands this fall.”

Vivalink contributed insights from the deployment of its digital health care solutions, including how to capture and visualize patient data, design alert systems to reduce clinician fatigue and build scalable workflows while improving data security and compliance.

The program breaks its resources down into four sections: the patient journey map, technical and operational, evaluation and reimbursement and implementation pillars.

The first section, the patient journey map, provides action items, best practices and checkpoints for the patient pathway through hospital-at-home, from referrals or consultations to discharge planning and care transitions.

The technical and operational section outlines the foundational components necessary to build technical and operational frameworks, including ensuring electronic health record (EHR) interoperability and defining clinical workflows.

The evaluation and reimbursement section includes measures, targets and insights to help providers and health plans secure sustainable reimbursement and prove ROI.

The Blueprint also includes five “implementation pillars” designed to help address implementation challenges and fully integrate a hospital-at-home program into a health system’s broader care delivery model.

The program’s membership includes Medically Home, which was acquired by DispatchHealth earlier this year. Medically Home is a hospital-at-home technology company that offers health systems and physician groups the clinical protocols, platform technology and clinical service fulfillment.

Christiana Care, a health care provider offering a variety of services, including home health care, that recently signed a letter of intent to co-found a regional not-for-profit health system with Virtua Health, is also one of the program’s inaugural members. Other members include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration and the Mayo Clinic.

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