Hospital at Home -- More Technical Details

Hospital at Home -- More Technical Details

More details into what hospital at home looks like from the patient, professional, and research side.

Mission Control Room for Hospital's at Home (Neo.Life): The author writes about her step-mom's experience with Medically Home (formerly Clinically Home). In less than two hours, "a nurse practitioner, a nurse, and an emergency medical technician arrived to get her room set up — complete with a hospital bed, an IV, and monitors like you’d find in an intensive-care unit." In addition, it was possible to press a button and teleconference with a physician or nurse practitioner 24/7. 

So what does the Mission Control room look like at Medically Home? A team of doctors, nurses, and care providers form a pod that cares for up to 14 patients at a time. Pods are responsible for patient care from start to finish, without hand-offs to other teams.

Successful 10 Year Home Hospitalization + Early Discharge Assessment in Spain (International Journal of Care): From 2006 to 2015, 4,165 surgical and medical acute and exacerbated chronic patients requiring admission into a highly specialized hospital were referred to home-based individualized care plan instead of hospitalized. Registered nurses visited the patients at home daily. Overall the results show that home-based individualized care is safe, effective and yields to a high level of satisfaction (98% of both professional team and patients). It is interesting to note that 82% of eligible cases to whom the service was offered accepted the option.   

For certain conditions, caring for patients at home is 32% cheaper than a hospital stay (Annals of Internal Medicine): In this small Medicare study from 2005, a majority of the elderly selected to be at home, stays at home were shorter than in the hospital, and costs per patients were 32% lower than acute hospital care ($5081 vs. $7480).

Check out this Case Control study of HaH patients in NYC: 507 participants with shorter length of stay; lower rates of 30-day hospital readmission, emergency department visits, and skilled nursing facility admissions; and better ratings of care. Rates of adverse events: the same as in the hospital.