Moving Health Home Announces a New Patient Story Bank

Thanksgiving is a time to be wherever you call home, even if you’re in need of health care.

I have personally experienced, and heard countless stories of patients and caregivers spending the holidays in the hospital or a long-term care facility. We try to make the most of it – decorating the room or bringing home-cooked meals – but it doesn’t compare, and is rarely preferred to being home.

A study commissioned by Moving Health Home shows that a majority (70%) of all Americans are comfortable receiving care in the home, 73% are confident in the quality of receiving care in the home, and a bipartisan majority of adults (73% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans) say it should be a priority for the federal government to increase access to clinical care in the home.

As a first step, we are calling on state and federal policymakers to implement permanent flexibilities and programs that build on the lessons learned from the temporary waivers of the Public Health Emergency (PHE).

At the federal level, needed changes include:

  1. Passing the bipartisan, bicameral Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act (S.3792/H.R.7053) before the end of the year so patients needing acute-level care, and their caregivers, would continue to have access to Hospital at Home.
  2. Passing an extension to the Medicare telehealth flexibilities.
  3. Passing the Choose Home Care Act of 2021 to give nursing home-eligible beneficiaries more options as to how and where to recover post-hospitalization.
  4. Ensuring that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is reimbursing home-based providers at parity with facility-based providers to allow equal access to care in the home and look at changes to network adequacy standards in private insurance to encourage coverage of home-based care.
  5. Working with stakeholders to ensure home is an option for care in traditional Medicare, which favors facility-based care. Congress could remove barriers in traditional Medicare to improve access to care in the home in areas such as personal care, infusion, labs, dialysis, diagnostics, and primary care all while also addressing workforce issues.

Facilities will always remain an essential part of American health care, but these actions are essential to ensuring that patients and families can choose their preferred site of care for many holidays to come.

Learn more from the countless patients benefiting from these innovative home-based care delivery models here: https://movinghealthhome.org/patient-stories/