Dan Gorenstein: As capacity in some hospitals dwindles, a new question becomes critical: Where do COVID patients go when they’re no longer sick enough for the hospital, but still need serious care? 

From the Annenberg Studio at the University of Pennsylvania, I’m Dan Gorenstein and this is Tradeoffs.

David Grabowski was like many of us at the beginning of March, absorbed in coverage of the coronavirus.

David Grabowski: I was reading about this nursing home out in Kirkland, Washington.

News clip: The Life Care Facility considered the epicenter of the outbreak.

Grabowski: Was hearing that a number of individuals at that facility had the virus.

News clip: Today the death toll of those who had coronavirus connected to the Life Care Center in Kirkland rose to 10.

Grabowski: I had this mental image that we might be dealing with the coronavirus in every nursing home in the country.

Gorenstein: David is a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School. He’s one of the few academics who has devoted his career to studying places just like that Washington nursing home.

The places where people go after they leave the hospital — skilled nursing facilities, rehabs and long-term care hospitals, what are known as  post-acute care facilities —tend to be a bit of a health policy backwater.

But the sheer scale of all the places patients land after discharge could be a lifesaver for hospitals looking to open up bedspace.

Grabowski: There are more skilled nursing facilities than Starbucks.

Gorenstein: Altogether, there are about 30,000 post-acute medical facilities and home health agencies, a $60 billion dollar a year industry that cares for about 5 million people.

As hospitals press to free up bedspace for the oncoming surge of patients, political leaders in states including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California have ordered nursing homes and these other facilities to accept COVID-postive patients, asking them to segregate those patients from everyone else. 

Grabowski: If you think about a nursing home or other long-term care setting, who lives there? It’s individuals who are older, individuals with high levels of chronic illness, and this virus has been incredibly harmful for older adults, for those with chronic illnesses.

Gorenstein: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on March 30 that more than 400 nursing homes and long-term care facilities have confirmed cases of COVID-19, more than double the number reported the week before.

Grabowski: That’s the tension: Hospitals need to discharge patients; skilled nursing facilities, however, for the most part, can’t safely care for those patients without harming other residents and their staff. 

Gorenstein: And David, what alternatives do we have to sending people recovering from COVID-19 to mainstream nursing homes?

Grabowski: What I would argue we want to do is create more specialized settings here where we can discharge COVID-positive patients to a COVID-only skilled nursing facility or long-term care hospital.

Charlie Baker: Good afternoon. I want to run through a few updates on the Commonwealth’s COVID-19 plans.

Grabowski: The state of Massachusetts has actually done something incredibly interesting. They are moving as a state to create 12 specialized COVID-only nursing homes. 

Gorenstein: Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker discussed the move at a news conference Monday, March 30.

Baker: This step will help us avoid imposing a mandate on skilled nursing facilities to take COVID-19 patients from hospitals. And we’ll have those facilities that are actually stood up to do this work, much better positioned to do it well, to do it right and to do it safely.

Gorenstein: Connecticut has announced a similar plan. 

Grabowski applauds the approach, but it means moving frail, sick, older adults out of the facilities they live in now. 

Grabowski: There are incredible health risks for them. The thought of of changing not only their their physical space, their building that their their living in, their home, but also changing their caregivers and their daily routine. That can be incredibly traumatic. I like the idea of building new skilled nursing facilities within hotels, building them within dorms.

Gorenstein: There’s another option that doesn’t involve costly and time-consuming retrofitting.

Rachel Werner: There’s a large portion of people that we could send home if we give them enough support to go home.

Gorenstein: Rachel Werner heads up the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and is an economist and physician.

Rachel points to new research that shows if patients get intensive, hospital-like care at home, it can lead to lower costs and fewer hospital readmissions.

Werner: People have set up the equivalent of a hospital at home to prevent people from being hospitalized. They send them home with 24/7 monitoring, using remote technology and frequent visits from nurses and doctors, and it prevents those hospitalizations. And I think if we can do that for acutely ill patients, we can probably do it for patients requiring rehabilitation after recovery from acute illness.

Gorenstein: And so what changes do you think would be necessary to beef up the care at home services?

Werner: There are two main things that would be required to make this work. One is Medicare would have to start paying for more visits at home. Currently, it’s limited to one visit per day. And so they would have to pay for telephone or video based visits during this period of rehabilitation at home. The other piece that Medicare would need to be able to pay for is to pay informal caregivers to provide the type of care that is needed to help people rehabilitate at home.

Gorenstein: Is that a safe proposition?

Werner: Caregivers with a little bit of training are very capable of taking care of patients in terms of helping with day-to-day things that many people need. There may be some concerns about transmission of the COVID virus to household contacts, and we would have to continue using the kind of precautions to prevent spread of COVID that we would in a health care setting, including masks and gowns. But I think that those are addressable problems that could easily be fixed.

Gorenstein: At the end of March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services  relaxed rules so hospitals can discharge patients quickly, including potentially to hotels and dorms. 

More at-home telehealth services are also now available to people on Medicare, but a CMS spokesperson did not respond when asked if the agency is considering adding steps like paying for multiple visits a day and reimbursing live-in caregivers. 

Rachel, at the same time, one of the potential downsides, I imagine, to sending people home is that they might end up not getting adequate care. And research that you’ve done has shown that that can happen.

Werner: Right, and so in the pre-COVID era, we did some research that was published about a year ago showing that when patients go home instead of to a skilled nursing facility, they’re more likely to be re-hospitalized in the 30 days after they get home compared to patients who go to a skilled nursing facility. And it’s not surprising because the care that people get at home under the current system is much less intense compared to the 24 hours, seven-days-a-week care that they get at a skilled nursing facility. In a world in which we’re providing more intensive care at home the difference in readmission rates would be much lower than what we observed in the past.

Gorenstein: At a time when just about everyone in health care is looking to the federal government for more money, Rachel says evidence suggests sending people home after the hospital could pay off.   

Werner: Comparing people who went home to people who went to skilled nursing facility, we found that on average, those people who went home, Medicare paid over $5,000 less for their care than they did for the same types of people who went to a skilled nursing facility instead.

We have an opportunity here, which we have never had before, which is to really rethink what we can do at home.

Grabrowski: I feel like with coronavirus, we’ve been playing catch up from the very beginning. We were obviously behind on testing. We’ve been behind on physical distancing. We’ve been behind on building enough hospital ICU beds. Post-acute care is actually an opportunity for us to get ahead.

Gornstein: Figuring out the safest place to send people recovering from COVID-19 is just another of the many challenges facing our health care system.

But it’s also an opportunity to rethink how and where we care for people after they leave the hospital.

And it could be a rare chance in this pandemic to actually save money while still providing high-quality care.

I’m Dan Gorenstein, this is Tradeoffs.