Perspective: COVID-19 – Relief, Recovery and Rebuilding

Every day the women and men of America’s hospitals and health systems continue the battle against COVID-19. As our heroes on the front lines care for our family members, friends and neighbors, the AHA is focused on three areas – relief, recovery and rebuilding – to support the field.

Relief. We’ve been working with Congress and the Administration on a number of efforts. In the last two COVID-19 legislative packages, we’ve helped secure $175 billion to reimburse health care providers for expenses or lost revenues not otherwise reimbursed that are directly attributable to COVID-19.

Some of that funding has been disbursed, and we expect to see additional funding directed to hospitals in high-impact COVID-19 areas and rural hospitals next week. With more than $100 billion remaining in the emergency relief fund, we have urged the Department of Health and Human Services to take immediate steps to target these funds to hospitals and health systems so that you can remain open and available to care for your communities.

We’ve also secured a Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital cut delay, temporary elimination of the Medicare sequester, and a Medicare diagnosis-related group 20% add-on payment for patients with COVID-19, as well as numerous regulatory changes to allow you to better respond to the virus.

And we know there’s more to do. We’re getting ready to roll out our priority areas for the next legislative package, and we’ll work with Congress to secure additional relief and help for hospitals and health systems as we move toward the first phase of recovery. 

We’re also continuing to connect suppliers of personal protective equipment with hospitals through our 100 Million Mask Challenge, which got some extra support from NASDAQ this week. Also, the Major League Baseball Players Trust lent their support to the Protect the Heroes campaign, an effort of the AHA, the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy and the Creative Coalition, which allows the public to donate directly to their local hospital to support health care heroes. And finally, the Dynamic Ventilator Reserve – a collaborative effort led by U.S. hospitals and health systems and supported by the AHA – continues to add to its virtual inventory with 24 hospitals and health systems stepping forward to add ventilators to the available pool.  

Recovery. As many states begin to reopen and others chart their path forward, the AHA Board of Trustees has created a task force that will issue to the field readiness and preparedness guidance for reopening our hospitals and health systems. Among other areas, the guidance will cover workforce considerations, testing and contact tracing, and internal and external communications needs. Watch for the initial chapter next week and more details very soon.

This guidance will build on a roadmap we recently released with the American College of Surgeons, American Society of Anesthesiologists, and Association of periOperative Registered Nurses on how to safely restart clinical care operations for patients and caregivers, as well as updated guidelines from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services so that hospitals can begin performing non-urgent surgeries and providing other non-emergent services.

Rebuilding. The COVID-19 pandemic will change our society and health care system forever. We will need to rebuild our system and do it in ways that involve, among other areas: rebooting our essential health services that we paused to focus on fighting the virus; reconsidering how we can better use technology like telehealth, which has been widely used during the pandemic, to improve access to care and reduce costs; and reimagining what our health care system will look like in a post-COVID-19 world.

Thank you for all you do each and every day to care for your patients and communities