Hospital capacity strain during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic accelerated the adoption of alternative models for health care practice. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued flexibilities for health system responses during the height of the public health emergency. Among these included the acute hospital care at home (AHCaH) waiver, which allowed hospitals to provide inpatient-level care to select patients in their homes. AHCaH is led by physicians, nurses, and paramedics who direct in-person and remote monitoring, infusions, point of care laboratory and imaging studies, home visits, and continuous telemedicine-enabled communication as a substitute to traditional hospitalization (Fig 1).
The emergence of AHCaH builds upon >25 years of service delivery research. Multiple randomized control trials and meta-analyses have demonstrated equivalent, if not improved, cost-effectiveness, health care utilization, safety, and family-centered and clinical outcomes compared with hospital-based care (Supplemental Table 1).1–3 The AHCaH waiver,...
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