Hospital-at-Home Tracker: Who’s launching, expanding, and innovating in 2026

For two years, hospital-at-home programs were caught in a policy holding pattern. Short-term Medicare waiver extensions, some lasting only months, made it nearly impossible for health systems to justify the investment required to build serious programs. 

That stalemate ended when Congress approved a five-year extension of the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver, replacing months-long renewals with a stable reimbursement horizon through 2030. Health systems now have permission to invest in command centers, dedicated staffing, remote monitoring infrastructure, and multiyear expansion plans without worrying that the revenue stream could vanish in the next budget fight. After two years of defensive positioning, hospital-at-home is shifting back into growth mode.

The next phase appears to be defined by three strategies: command-center centralization, higher-acuity expansion, and payer diversification. Here’s who’s launching, expanding, and innovating in 2026.

DispatchHealth + Saint Francis Health System

Tulsa, Oklahoma | Launched February 6, 2026

DispatchHealth spent much of 2025 in retreat. After merging with Medically Home and failing to achieve the growth either company had anticipated, it exited one market and scaled back operations across nine others. The five-year extension changed its calculus. Three days after the waiver was signed, DispatchHealth announced a new hospital-at-home partnership with Saint Francis Health System in Tulsa, its clearest signal yet that the company is rebuilding.

The program currently treats five to six patients daily, with capacity designed to reach 40. Saint Francis has set its sights beyond the Tulsa metro area. Nearly 60% of its patient base comes from outside Tulsa County, and rural expansion is an explicit part of the program’s long-term strategy.

NewYork-Presbyterian

Manhattan | Launched November 17, 2025

NewYork-Presbyterian launched Hospital at Home across Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medical Center in November 2025, months before the waiver extension was signed. The program serves Medicare patients within 30 minutes of either campus, combining continuous remote vital sign monitoring with twice-daily in-person visits and daily physician telehealth check-ins.

What sets the NYP model apart is its attention to discharge. Before a patient leaves the program, the care team has already arranged follow-up appointments and medication plans—an effort to address the hand-off failures that most commonly drive readmissions. With five years of authorization now secured, the program is positioned to expand both its geographic reach and patient eligibility criteria.

Penn Medicine

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | Rolling out across three hospitals, early 2026

Penn Medicine designed its hospital-at-home program alongside a parallel initiative called PATH, Practical Alternatives to Hospitalization, which catches patients who need more than outpatient care but don’t meet the bar for acute admission. Hospital-at-home serves the tier above.

The two-program structure addresses a problem that has tripped up other health systems. Hospital-at-home programs without a lower-acuity alternative often struggle to find the right patients—admitting too few, or admitting patients who don’t need that level of care. Penn’s early 2026 rollout across three hospitals builds on a nine-month pilot and is designed with full-system expansion as the end goal.

Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland, Ohio | Expanding to Florida

Cleveland Clinic has admitted roughly 3,000 patients to its hospital-at-home program since April 2023, averaging 24 patients per day. Central to that growth is a proprietary care coordination infrastructure called CIViC, the Clinically Integrated Virtual Command Center, which allows clinical teams to manage home hospital patients across multiple sites from a single hub. As the health system expands into Florida, CIViC is what makes that geographic reach operationally feasible.

Cleveland Clinic has also partnered with Mayo Clinic on the Home-Based Care Research Consortium, focused on generating the longitudinal outcomes data the field will need when it makes its case for permanent Medicare authorization in 2030.

Tampa General Hospital

Tampa, Florida | Targeting 50-patient daily capacity

Tampa General is treating transplant and oncology patients through its hospital-at-home program—a level of clinical complexity that most programs have not attempted. The health system is tracking outcomes carefully, and early data shows lower readmission rates compared to traditional inpatient care for equivalent patient populations. As the field builds its case for permanent authorization, evidence from high-acuity programs like Tampa General’s will carry significant weight with policymakers.

Virtua Health

Southern New Jersey | Expanding under new state law

Virtua has enrolled more than 900 patients across 60-plus medical conditions since launching in January 2022, operating across all five of its South Jersey hospitals. The program runs out of a centralized command center in Pennsauken, where clinicians monitor patients around the clock using continuous wearable vital sign data.

Virtua has done something few hospital-at-home programs have managed—it secured reimbursement agreements with private insurers in New Jersey, not just Medicare. That work positioned the health system well when New Jersey passed the Hospital at Home Act in late 2024, expanding program eligibility beyond Medicare to additional payer categories. Virtua now has both the clinical infrastructure and the payer relationships to grow into the expanded authorization.

The next five years

The five-year extension resolved the immediate uncertainty that had frozen investment in hospital-at-home. But permanent Medicare authorization, the outcome the field is ultimately working toward, is not guaranteed. It will require a robust evidence base, and the programs being built and expanded today are the ones that will have to produce it.

The extension provides runway through 2030. Whether hospital-at-home becomes a permanent fixture in American care delivery will depend on the evidence generated during that period.