On July 17, 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) announced it will begin distributing $10 billion in a second round of funding to hospitals operating in high impact COVID-19 areas. The distribution is anticipated to begin as early as today, Monday, July 20, 2020. Hospitals with over 161 COVID-19 admissions between January 1 and June 10, 2020, or one admission per day, or that experienced a disproportionate intensity of COVID-19 admissions (exceeding the average ratio of COVID-19 admissions/bed) will receive funding in this distribution in the amount of $50,000 per eligible admission.

Eligibility for the distribution was determined via a data submission request HHS made June 8, 2020. HHS requested data from hospitals regarding their COVID-19 positive-inpatient admissions for January 1, 2020 through June 10, 2020. HHS also took into account the previous payments made to hospitals in the first round of high impact funding. HHS anticipates that payments from this $10 billion distribution will provide relief to more than 1,000 hospitals. Between these two rounds of funding, total committed payments to hospitals in high impact areas, to date, are over $20 billion, representing almost 12 percent of the entire $175 billion Provider Relief Fund program.

A current list of hospital recipients is available here, and a state-by-state breakdown of funding is available here. For information about Provider Relief Fund distributions, see Sheppard Mullin’s previous blog post available here.

This article is not an unequivocal statement of the law, but instead represents our best interpretation of where things currently stand.  This article does not address the potential impacts of the numerous other local, state and federal orders that have been issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but which are not referenced in this article.