ÌÇÐÄVlog

December 2025

Last month in Orlando, I attended a first-of-its-kind roundtable discussion as ¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾«Æ· Children's brought together 30 of the nation’s leading experts in home-based pediatric care. Our mission was nothing short of disruptive: to map the future of this new model of pediatric healthcare.

For decades, pediatric care has been binary: inpatient or outpatient. Both models come with tradeoffs.

Children’s hospitals in America deliver the best inpatient care in the world, but they also separate families from home, school, and daily life. Being in the hospital is mentally, financially, and logistically hard on children and families. Understandably, most want to return to their familiar routines as soon as possible.

At the same time, outpatient pediatric care allows families to be together at home, but offices have limited hours, and it can take time to reach a child’s provider. For children with significant medical needs, there is often a shortage of in-home medical services in the community. When care moves beyond routine visits and common ailments, families can struggle to navigate the system and meet their child’s needs.

Bridging Hospital and Home

¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾«Æ· is among a small group of children’s hospitals innovating to fill that gap. Our Advanced Care at Home program, launched this summer, allows families to return home from the hospital supported by frequent virtual visits, dedicated clinicians they can reach 24/7, and any needed monitoring equipment — all while keeping families together.

Advanced Care at Home does not replace inpatient care for the sickest kids, but it offers enhanced levels of support at home for discharged patients that can shorten hospital stays, prevent readmissions and emergency room visits, keep many kids out of the hospital altogether, and free up hospital beds for children who truly need to be there.

Improving Care and Lowering Costs

Not only does this model keep families together at home, it creates better outcomes at a lower cost. To date, we have seen 138 patients through ¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾«Æ· Advanced Care at Home program and helped their families avoid 111 Emergency Department visits. In less than a year, we have reduced costs by over $1 million from a combination of earlier hospital discharges and fewer readmissions.

The average number of patients enrolled in our program on a given day grew from 10 in May to 76 in November. We began the program at ¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾«Æ· Children’s Hospital, Florida, and will soon begin offering it to our patients in the Delaware Valley.

Our patients report incredible satisfaction with Advanced Care at Home, reporting improved quality of life, reduced stress, and fewer ED visits and hospital readmissions. We find that in the familiarity of their homes, kids sleep and eat better — both essential components of healing.

Facing the Challenges

As with any innovation in medical care, there are significant obstacles to overcome as we work to scale this new care model nationally. Our aim at the roundtable event was to better understand these challenges and work together across institutions to address them.

Most notably, payment models need to evolve so that pediatric health systems are incentivized to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital.

Under the current fee for service model, hospitals are paid for the services they provide — not the services they are able to avoid. In many cases, providing advanced care at home will result in less revenue for the provider. We need to work with payers to find the right levels of compensation for this new model of care, but it will take time and a demonstrated track record of success.

By working together on research, we can better measure developmental outcomes, family engagement, and cost savings in large, geographically diverse patient populations. Many attendees left our roundtable eager to collaborate on future research.

If we want to provide even more services at home, regulations also need to evolve so that freestanding children’s hospitals are allowed to provide a wider array of services in the home. We also discussed how to harness our collective patient volumes to incentivize manufacturers to create pediatric versions of their home health equipment.

Shaping a New Model of Care

We are at the beginning of a journey to make higher levels of medical care accessible to patients in their homes, all across America. Our roundtable underscored the urgent need for collaboration and advocacy to make that a reality.

Before the event concluded, we mapped out an agenda for the first national conference on pediatric advanced care at home, which ¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾Ã¾«Æ· will host in 2026.

As I write this in early December, we have 90 children enrolled in the program. That’s 90 families who are home for the holiday season, knowing they have strong medical support for their children around the clock. That is the peace of mind we want to bring to more families nationwide.