• Posted December 8, 2025

Want To Save Rural Hospitals? Send Patients Home To Recover, Study Argues

Discharging hospital patients early to recover at home might be key to saving rural health care, a new study says.

Rural patients cost a good deal less to care for during recovery at home than in a hospital, researchers recently reported in JAMA Network Open.

What’s more, those patients tend to be happier and more active than those who stay in the hospital for the full length of their recovery, researchers found.

“Rural health care is in a crisis, and we need to think differently,” lead researcher Dr. David Levine, clinical director of research & development at Mass General Brigham Healthcare at Home in Boston, said in a news release.

“Hospital-level care delivered in patients’ homes has improved healthcare delivery in urban settings but may fill an even greater need in rural areas, where longer transit times, poor accessibility, and hospital closures challenge access to high quality care,” Levine added.

More than 150 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and more closures are feared due to cuts in the Medicaid program, researchers said in background notes. Given that, new ways need to be found to care for sick folks in rural areas.

For this trial, researchers recruited 161 people who were hospitalized for treatable illnesses like infections, pneumonia, heart failure, COPD or asthma. The patients were drawn from two rural hospitals, one in Kentucky and the other in Canada.

Half of the patients were sent home to recover after less than three days in the hospital. There, they received hospital-level home health care services. The other half remained in the hospital for the length of their treatment.

Those sent home benefitted from health technology innovations — a wireless sticker on their chest to replace the usual set of monitoring devices, IV infusion pumps small enough to fit in a fanny pack and handheld meters that could check a patient’s labs right in the home.

Overall, sending patients home cost 27% less than leaving them in the hospital during recovery, researchers found.

Home patients moved around more, taking an average 700 more steps per day than those kept in the hospital, results show.

The patients sent home to recover also reported nearly double the satisfaction with their care as those who remained in the hospital — 88 versus 46, out of a scale of 100.

“We’ve shown that home hospital care not only works in rural settings, but that patients also prefer their care at home,” Levine said.

Readmission rates were similar after 30 days of treatment, meaning that those sent home didn’t wind up back in the hospital more than others, the study says. Likewise, no major differences in treatment safety were found between the two groups.

Researchers now are working to develop a mobile clinic housed in an electric vehicle that could deliver hospital-level care to rural areas in the United States.

“Hopefully this work can spur patients, clinicians, and healthcare leaders in rural areas to recommend, request and build home hospital programs,” Levine said. “Those particular areas that may have lost their hospital may be able to establish home hospital programs that are less expensive than brick-and-mortar care and employ clinicians that work locally.”

“We hope others can use this research to take action in their communities because we have seen that when patients desire certain models of care, those models come to fruition,” Levine continued. “We feel this may be one innovation to help solve the rural healthcare crisis.”

More information

The American Hospital Association has more on the rural hospital crisis.

SOURCE: Mass General Brigham, news release, Dec. 1, 2025