Hosts for Hospitals

HOSTS for HOSPITALS was founded in March 2000 by Mike Aichenbaum and Nancy Wimmer, who from their own long out-of-town hospitalizations each developed a deep, personal empathy for patient-families in need of affordable places to stay.

Under their direction from July 2000 through August 2010, 347 host-families have now provided over 1,700 patient-families coming to Greater Philadelphia hospitals close to 50,000 nights of lodging, saving these patient-families together a combined $2.95 million in equivalent hotel expenses!

They now are helping to have host-homes programs set-up for hospitals in other cities, the first of which is the Memorial Regional Health System in Hollywood, Florida.

In November 1988, though, Mike was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife and their two toddler sons.   He was diagnosed with advanced Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia when he was unable to remember the name of his eight-month old son, Josh.  Mike became an in-patient at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in Manhattan for the next six months.  

The year before while living in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Nancy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. She was hospitalized for four months at John Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.  Her son and daughter at the time were under five years old.

Both Mike and Nancy were to receive bone-marrow transplants.  In addition to the anxiety of working with physicians to find the best treatments, each of their families had to bear numbingly expensive lodging costs for the accompanying family members.  During Mike’s hospitalization, his wife, their sons and Mike’s mother rented  an apartment across from the hospital at a total cost of over $20,000.  During Nancy’s hospitalization, her parents incurred a similar, huge lodging expense.

Upon recovery both Mike and Nancy relocated with their respective families to the Philadelphia area.  In 1999, Mike learned about the Boston-based Hospitality Program, a nonprofit agency that since 1983 had been providing zero or low-cost lodging for patient-families through a network of volunteer-host homes.  Recognizing the need for such lodging services for families traveling to Philadelphia for medical care, Mike began exploring the possibility of establishing such a program for the Greater Philadelphia area.

Nancy meanwhile had founded the Patients’ Legal Advocacy Center at Temple Law School.  Upon hearing of the idea to establish a hospitality program in Philadelphia, Nancy joined with Mike in March of 2000 as they formally incorporated their organization as HOSTS for HOSPITALS, Inc.  In May of that year they paid the Hospitality Program to have a consultant train them how to manage a host-homes program, and in July began providing free lodging to out-of-town patient-families coming to Greater Philadelphia area hospitals.