WORCESTER, Mass. — As Americans brace for a potential government shutdown, some programs are facing an immediate halt in service, including hospital-at-home.
Launched in 2021, hospital-at-home is a program that allows patients to recover at home, while also freeing up hospital beds, a problem that has plagued local health systems for years. However, the waiver that allows the program to run is set to expire Tuesday night, and with a government shutdown looming, an extension on the waiver is up in the air.
Dr. Constantinos Michaelidis is the medical director for the program at UMass Memorial Health and said this brings a huge challenge for the medical center both in terms of capacity and boarding.
“This is not where we want to be. We’re taking basically a decade’s step in the wrong direction, instead of taking a decade’s step forward,” Dr. Michaelidis said.
Nearly 4,000 patients have benefitted from hospital-at-home and 20 of them who were in the program just last week have now either been discharged or brought back into the hospital for care.
“It sort of breaks my heart that we’ve had to bring our patients back because they’re now going to be boarding in the hallways of our emergency department waiting for care when we know they would have such a better experience with very high quality care at home and be able to relieve that boarding problem,” Dr. Michaelidis said.
Kimberly Dumais-Hutt has used the program twice and expects that she’ll need to use it again at some point since her liver transplant makes her prone to infections.
“There’s something easing about being in your own home. I believe very strongly that you heal faster, you heal better when you’re at home,” Hutt said.
The 54-year-old credits the program for her recovery and feels for all the patients impacted by the current suspension.
“The people that have to go back into the hospital are going back into a worse situation, a more compromised situation,” Dumais-Hutts said. “Thinking that it’s going to be a prolonged period that they’re not going to have this program. If I get sick between now and when they come back, I don’t even want to think about how that’s going to affect my positivity.”
Congress has extended the waiver several times, and there is bipartisan support to extend it again if lawmakers pass a budget resolution by Tuesday night, avoiding a shutdown.
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