COVID-era program has proven its worth

Five years ago almost to the day, if you can believe it, COVID-19 was formally declared a worldwide pandemic. The impact from that declaration and the coming months of unprecedented chaos and disruption is something that no one who lived through it will ever forget.
And while there is no shortage of decisions and governmental reactions stemming from that surreal time period where we can play Monday morning quarterback, we would rather applaud a program that came out of that time and should be enthusiastically continued.
Kent Hospital, recognizing that some patients could benefit from remaining at home while receiving treatments for various ailments, became a trailblazer in Rhode Island with the first program of its kind in the Ocean State — Hospital at Home, which recently celebrated treating its 1,000th patient.
The program, while a first in Rhode Island, is just one among hundreds found in 38 other states. And that wide pool of data, from drastically different parts of the nation, has given good reason to believe that the program makes a real difference in creating positive patient outcomes and lessening the burden on hospital systems that are frequently strained.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the benefits of such a program.
Rather than forcing a patient — for example, a person in their late 80s — from being moved out of their home (where they are most comfortable) into a stressful and often chaotic environment, that patient can receive treatment at home with a doctor or nurse coming to them. This enables them not only to recover faster from their illness, but it reduces the likelihood of them picking up some other sickness or infection while forced into staying at the hospital.
But as with all good things worthy of keeping or expanding, it all comes down to funding. And, like so many things right now, the mechanism providing for this program is in jeopardy of expiring or disappearing altogether.
The Hospital at Home program was made possible by a waiver provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that provided Medicaid reimbursements for home care that matched hospital care. Today, the ultimate state of Medicaid funding rests in the balance and at the peril of being de-funded by a Republican-led Congressional budget bill. But even more directly than that, the aforementioned waiver is set to expire at the end of March, and it has not been renewed yet.
While we understand that our federal delegation has a limited ability to reign in a foolhardy desire to use Medicaid as a sacrificial lamb within our federal budget, we hope that they can join colleagues from both sides of the aisle in extending the waiver that enables this program to happen in the first place. Then, if Medicaid funding survives, patients can continue to receive high-quality care from the comfort of their home; and one of the few positive legacies of Covid can live on.