Lawmakers have extended the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver through 2030, which will grant waivers to individual hospitals who provide Medicare patients with inpatient-level home care.
Hospital-at-home has gained steady traction in recent years as health systems work to improve patient experience, reduce costs, and alleviate capacity constraints.
Here are five things ASC leaders and physicians need to know about the program extension:
1. According to the American Medical Association, the waiver extension is a part of the 2026 Consolidated Appropriations Act. The waiver was first created in 2020 as hospitals shifted care to home settings in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Hospital-at-home programs are emerging as an important tool for optimizing inpatient-outpatient flows as more surgical cases and other procedures shift to ASCs and outpatient facilities.
“I think we have to figure out how to create a more robust hospital-at-home kind of scenario where there’s home healthcare that’s available to provide services that don’t demand a hospital setting, but are still kind of hospital-level services,” Walter Allen Fink, DO, chief medical officer of UT Health San Antonio, told Becker’s was asked about apps that exist in his system’s optimization of outpatient care.
“There’s a lot of home health that goes on, but there’s a lot of gaps in making sure that we’re doing that correctly and working that system to be optimal. And then it’s got to be paid for, frankly.”
3. Becker’s has reported on at least four health systems starting new hospital-at-home programs in 2025.
4. A report by Linus showed that two-thirds of American 60–79 years old want to stay at home in their later years. Currently, 366 programs across 139 health systems in 37 states have been approved to provide acute hospital care at home, according to the AMA, and other health systems and hospitals have indicated that they are interested in setting up these programs but have been hesitant without a long-term extension of the program.
5. In August, the AMA advocated for the waiver extension in a letter to Sens. Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock.
