Healthcare at Your Doorstep: A Paradigm Shift For Hospitals
We are living in a time where hospital visits seem to be on the rise. With 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day and hospital trips being the norm for many of them, it is no wonder that hospital bed occupancy has been increasing over the years. However, healthcare providers have a growing trend to provide care at home instead of in hospitals. This approach is beneficial, and leading health systems across the country are adopting it as their modus operandi.
The healthcare sector now has abundant data and AI technology tools to forecast and personalized treatment for each patient. Urgent care in the home is becoming more convenient than ever before, with new methods to providing at-home health care, such as virtual care visits. These changes have the potential to alter how much time patients spend in an actual hospital.
Current Landscape
Fast track to the pandemic world today, and the hospital at home can be an excellent alternative for Covid positive patients that do not need to be hospitalized but require intensive monitoring. Spinning up this operation quickly can create the capacity needed for sick patients that needs a hospital bed.
The key to success here can transfer the patient from the home setting to a hospital if required. Hospitals with their ambulance fleet will have the edge over those that rely on a third-party service.
Post Pandemic Play
Hospitals at home are quite popular in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. There is a lot of evidence that they save money while improving patient satisfaction. This approach has never taken off in the United States until now, where there is an emphasis on population health management and value-based care.
One-way health systems satisfy consumer and cultural demands for improved access, equality, and experience in healthcare via the hospital-at-home model. Telehealth, remote monitoring, and mobile care providers provide community patients with an inpatient level of care. These treatments are best suited for medium-acuity patients with well-defined treatment regimens (e.g., COPD, heart failure). The program must also include transitional care to assist complicated individuals in transition from the hospital quicker.
Technology Lead The Way
This is an opportunity for CIOs to shine and lead the way in developing a set of tools that can deliver care anywhere, anytime. The following are solutions in your current portfolio are solutions to consider.
Virtual Care - Expand the organization's current telemedicine solution or establish a new one to figure out how to bring the platform readily to a patient's house. I've seen inroads to patients' homes made with partnerships with broadband carriers or cable TV operators.
Map Route Optimization - Delivery of care at home necessitates the clinician to go and visit the patient's house. To ensure that your clinicians are traveling using optimum routing based on the schedule, use and collaborate with solutions such as Google Map, Apple Map, or a third party.
Wearables and Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) - RPM and simple-to-use wearables for monitoring are easy to use and deploy. The technology is straightforward, but establishing a full-time command center operations that can monitor many patients simultaneously is essential.
It's no longer a question of if hospital-at-home programs will become standard care, but when. The trend is here to stay, and the only thing that remains uncertain is how quickly hospitals across America will adopt it. Hospital systems can address this uncertainty with thoughtful preparation for their investment in a hospital at home program. Start by identifying your top challenges before you start implementing strategy, and then work diligently to overcome them!
