As more elderly Americans choose to stay in their homes rather than go into a nursing home, more doctors are needed to make house calls to provide their care, according to a recent study.
The country faces a shortage of doctors and healthcare practitioners to care for homebound patients, according to the study published in Health Affairs. About 5,000 primary care providers made 1.7 million home visits to Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries in 2013--a number that accounts for 70 percent of all home-based medical visits, the study found. Nine percent of those providers performed 44 percent of the visits.
The trouble is that most homebound patients live more than 30 miles from one of those providers of home-based care, the study found. It’s estimated that there are as many as 4 million homebound Americans who need care, a number that is growing as more older Americans choose to age at home.
The healthcare system hasn't kept pace with the need. “This paper really shows us that access to home-based healthcare is extremely limited, highly concentrated and just not available to all who need it,” Katherine Ornstein, a professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said in an interview with Reuters.
House calls are an old idea that is being revisited. For instance, house calls to recently discharged high-risk, frail and psychologically comprised patients helped reduce preventable emergency room visits and hospital readmissions, one study found. However, traveling to appointments can limit the number of patients a doctor can see each day.
- find the study abstract