Hospital at Home meets need for new dialysis patients

The COVID-19 pandemic has had lingering effects in healthcare. During the pandemic, inpatient bed shortages became a major barrier to providing care, and access to outpatient dialysis was delayed due to a shortage of staff. This resulted in lengthy admissions to the hospital while awaiting outpatient dialysis placement in a time when hospital bedspace was a scarce resource. In this report we describe the use of the Hospital at Home program for inpatient dialysis care as a novel method to both provide high quality patient care at home and also open inpatient beds in the hospital. Here, we present two cases where this program served both the needs of the patient and the hospital system by providing dialysis care to patients participating in the Hospital at Home program. One was a patient with a recent kidney transplant awaiting improvement in kidney function following transplant. The other was a new mother who was diagnosed with atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome and was awaiting recovery from her acute kidney injury after receiving complement inhibitor therapy. This program has been functional for the past 13 months and has served 37 patients and saved 1,007 inpatient days during that period. Each inpatient day provided by Hospital at Home represents bed space that was made available to another patient in need.