NPR Examines Increased Availability Of In-Home Care For Elderly Patients, USA

Main Category: Caregivers / Homecare
Article Date: 21 Dec 2005 - 0:00 PDT

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NPR's "Morning Edition" on Monday reported on the increasing availability of at-home physician visits for elderly U.S. residents. According to a research letter published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, house calls to Medicare beneficiaries increased 40% from 1998 to 2004. Steven Landers, director of a house call program at Case Western Reserve University's Department of Family Medicine and co-author of the research letter to JAMA, said that a 1998 decision to increase physician reimbursements for home visits to Medicare beneficiaries by as much as 50% contributed to an at-home services' "comeback." According to Eric DeJonge, a Washington, D.C.-based physician who works with Washington Hospital Center's Medical House Call Program, providing home-based care brings "significant" cost savings by preventing some high-cost events. For example, emergency department visits cost about $2,000 with a 911 call, compared with about $100 for an urgent house call. In addition, house call program participants are discharged an average of two-and-a-half days sooner when they are hospitalized because they receive at-home checkups after discharge. In October, Medicare began a three-year pilot program to examine whether house calls increase cost savings and improve beneficiaries' health (Godoy, NPR, 12/19). The program will test several forms of in-home care through six demonstration projects in selected communities nationwide. Under the demonstration projects, 15,000 Medicare beneficiaries in Texas, California and Florida will have access to in-home care from physicians (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 8/2). The NPR segment also includes comments from Constance Row, executive director of the American Academy of Home Care Physicians (NPR, 12/19). The complete transcript is available online.

NPR Profiles Program
NPR's "Morning Edition" on Monday profiled Washington Hospital Center's house call program, which coordinates care for patients who have difficulty traveling to a doctor's office. A team of physicians, nurse practitioners and social workers make frequent at-home visits, use a range of portable medical equipment in patients' homes and meet weekly to review cases. The segment includes comments from DeJonge and George Taler, co-founder of the program (Shapiro, "Morning Edition," NPR, 12/19). A transcript of the segment is available online.

The complete segment is available online in RealPlayer.

"Reprinted with permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

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