Under pressure to reduce costs while improving quality, some hospital systems are offering hospital-level treatment in patients' homes, according to an article in the New York Times.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins settled on four diagnoses that could be treated without the patient’s being physically in the hospital: heart failure, exacerbations of emphysema, certain types of pneumonia, and a bacterial skin infection called cellulitis.

The trend toward taking hospital patients out of the hospital “will continue to evolve and get tested, but I think this will see its day,” experts said. In the past two years, Johns Hopkins has received calls from at least a hundred system administrators eager to learn more about how to hospitalize patients in their homes.

“My sense is that over time, hospitals will become places that you go only to get really specialized, really high-tech care,” Dr. Bruce Leff said.

Read the article.