New Moving Health Home Coalition Aims to Expand Home-Based Care Services

A group of healthcare providers, valued-based care organizations, and Amazon’s telehealth business have come together to call for changes to reimbursement models that would support a range of services in the home from primary care to hospital-level interventions. A press release from the new organization, Moving Health Home, states that it is time to, “change reimbursement models and the culture around institutional care to allow for Americans to choose their home as a site of care.”

“We don't need to necessarily totally displace institutional care, but we need to make the home sort of an option for people for all different kinds of health care services,” stated the coalition’s manager, Krista Drobac. Founding members, which include Amazon Care, Landmark Health, Signify Health, Dispatch Health, Elara Caring, Intermountain Healthcare, Home Instead and Ascension, assert that, “care in the home can be at least equivalent to, if not better than, care offered in facilities.”

Moving Health Home’s policy priorities include retaining the hospital-without-walls site of care flexibilities that have been permitted during the COVID-19 public health emergency; eliminating institutional bias that favors institutional-based codes in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule; creating an extended home-based care benefit as an alternative for skilled nursing facility care; and integrating telehealth.

Although the group sees home-based services as being different – or at least more encompassing- than home health, hospice, or non-medical homecare (personal care), their formation is further evidence of a very real shift that is taking place in the country; which should create plenty opportunity for providers already serving people at home.