WASHINGTON, D.C. — Researchers and health care analysts can now access nearly five years of federal data on hospital-at-home care, following a new release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
What This Means for You
- Researchers can study how hospital-level care works in patients’ homes
- Findings could shape future health care delivery and policy decisions
- Data may influence how hospitals treat patients outside traditional settings
The new dataset includes information collected from April 2023 through September 2025 under the Acute Hospital Care at Home initiative, a federal program that allows certain patients to receive inpatient-level care at home instead of in a hospital.
Combined with earlier data, the release provides a broader view of how the program has operated since its launch in 2020.
How the Program Works
The Acute Hospital Care at Home initiative allows Medicare-certified hospitals to treat eligible patients at home with services typically provided in a hospital.
The program began during the COVID-19 public health emergency, when federal officials temporarily waived certain requirements that normally require patients to receive care inside hospital facilities.
Those waivers allowed hospitals to provide services such as nursing care and monitoring in a patient’s home while still meeting key health and safety standards.
Congress has since extended the program, allowing it to continue through September 2030.
What the Data Includes
The dataset provides information on:
- The number of patients treated at home
- Cases where patients required transfer back to a hospital
- Instances of unexpected patient deaths during care
An “escalation of care” refers to a situation where a patient receiving care at home must be transferred to a hospital for additional treatment.
“Unanticipated mortality” refers to a patient death that occurs during treatment, excluding those receiving hospice or palliative care.
The data also includes aggregated claims and eligibility information for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries treated under the program.
How to Access the Data
Researchers must request access through the Research Data Assistance Center and obtain a Data Use Agreement before using the information.
A user guide has also been released to support analysis.
More information is available at https://www2.ccwdata.org/web/guest/data-dictionaries.
Next Steps
Federal officials said the expanded dataset is intended to support ongoing evaluation of the hospital-at-home model and inform future decisions about its role in the health care system.
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