Your Next Hospital Bed Might Be at Home

January 26, 2023

(New York Times) – Presbyterian started its home-hospital after a 2005 paper in The Annals of Internal Medicine found its way to its executives’ desks. The lead author, Bruce Leff, a geriatrician and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, successfully conducted a pilot trial in the late 1990s. (I met Leff later, when I was a medical student there.) With support from the John A. Hartford Foundation and the hospital leadership at Hopkins, Leff hospitalized patients in their own homes who were at least 65 and had been given one of a few straightforward diagnoses: a worsening of their heart failure, or emphysema, pneumonia or a bad skin infection. These patients did so well that Leff tried to spread the word by calling hospital leaders. “You kind of got the sense that people thought I had two heads,” Leff told me. (Read More)