Hospital at home: the future of care is anywhere, anytime

The healthcare industry as we know it is undergoing a monumental transformation as providers increasingly connect with patients outside of a hospital’s four walls to enable more care and healing to happen at home. Telehealth is quickly becoming a new best practice in the industry, broadly becoming accepted as a way to enhance the patient experience and improve patient outcomes, all while potentially lowering cost of care. Rather than the hospital serving as the hub of all care, hospitals are fast becoming centers of excellence for specialized care or highly acute conditions, turning to ‘hospital at home’ models of care for other traditionally in-person services. In this model, telehealth becomes the patient’s first point of access for urgent care, consultations with a specialist, self-care education, chronic care management, and more. While COVID-19 was certainly a catalyst for this transition, telehealth utilization has stabilized at levels 38 times higher than before the pandemic as of July 2021 – a clear sign that it is here to stay.

Virtual care extends beyond its role as a convenient point of access to patients. It is essential to support ongoing staff shortages and help to alleviate burnout, particularly in challenging times where health systems are at maximum capacity or even overloaded. From the patient perspective, virtual care is growing to be an expectation – 60% of patients want to keep using virtual care tools in the future and by 2022, 60% of chronic disease pathways will involve remote patient monitoring [1]. And, from the provider perspective, this shift is necessary to remain competitive in a value-based care environment – up to $250 billion, or 20% of current U.S. healthcare spending could be virtualized. If they haven’t already, health systems must improve the maturity of their telehealth capabilities to successfully keep pace with this momentum.

In an effort to drive further adoption and continued reimbursement of virtual care, Philips collaborates closely with the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) in a joint commitment to connect care across settings. By combining their respective expertise and breadth of telehealth experience, the partnership helps promote the expansion of virtual care and transform care delivery. Philips and the ATA believe that when done strategically and with the right technology infrastructure, a deliberate and smooth hospital-to-home transition can provide a more streamlined and personalized approach to patient care, improves the provider experience, and lowers the cost of care.

Activating hospital-level care at home

Extending the reach of patient care through connected technology means empowering providers to understand a patient’s wellbeing in real-time and make confident decisions about the most appropriate care setting for each patient. Collecting, organizing, analyzing, and acting upon critical patient data via cloud-based solutions that break down data silos can help to keep patients with chronic conditions or rising acute needs out of the hospital and comfortably at home. Proactive monitoring can not only reduce a patient’s risk of admission, but also help health systems better manage their patient load and resources.

Whether a patient was recently discharged or needs consistent oversight of a chronic condition, advanced remote patient monitoring can help provide clinicians with a holistic view of a patient from afar. Subjective patient-reported responses via ongoing surveys can be combined with objective data capture of vital signs and other metrics from connected devices to give providers a comprehensive understanding of a patient’s status. When coupled with strong predictive algorithms, providers can help ensure early identification of patients with deteriorating conditions and focus their attention accordingly. Virtual care ultimately helps patients take a more active role in managing their health – empowering them to track important health indicators and have meaningful conversations with their clinician about their progress can help improve long-term outcomes.

“Virtual care is an essential way to support staff shortages and clinical burnout, while also delivering on the quadruple aim of healthcare. Through effective data integration, AI-enabled clinical decision support tools and wearables, the physical distance between the patient and the provider is no longer an indicator of the quality of care delivered,” said Roy Jakobs, Chief Business Leader, Connected Care, Philips. “When done right, telehealth opens up a world of possibilities – we can meet patients where they are and create meaningful connections from within the home, turn reactive care into proactive care, and reduce readmission risks. From remote chronic condition management to the most acute tele-ICU needs, we’re proud to support health systems’ end-to-end virtual care journey, keeping care connected and nimbly extended across care settings.”

It starts with the right partner

To help guide this transformation, healthcare organizations should seek a partner that not only offers advanced virtual care solutions, but also one with a proven track record in successfully implementing the foundational technology infrastructures needed to support these new care delivery models. For those health systems just staring their virtual care journey, they should identify a technology partner that has both the expertise and collaborative approach necessary and that will work alongside them to strategize how best to deploy and scale telehealth solutions with their unique challenges in mind.

Telehealth Awareness Week

Alongside the ATA, Philips is a founding partner of Telehealth Awareness Week, which takes place September 19 – 25, to reinforce the central role that telehealth plays in ensuring everyone has access to safe, effective and appropriate care when and where they need it. Philips participated in two on-demand webinars alongside other industry experts that explore hospital-at-home models and activating healthcare anywhere:

• Healthcare Anywhere: Transforming How and Where People Receive Care (available On Demand via the Telehealth Awareness Week events page)
  Hear leaders in virtual care discuss how they work with their health systems, communities, and networks to adapt to the prominence of the home in care, how they are advancing digital transformation and enabling collaboration across care settings, and how they are investing in data-driven insights to deliver personalized care at scale.
• Hospital at Home – A Value-Driven and Sustainable Care Model?
  After more than a decade as a niche offering, hospital-level care at home is ready to rise, boosted by hospitals seeking to relieve overcrowding during the pandemic, changing patient preference, and insurers interested in lowering healthcare costs. But, implementation roadblocks, including patient selection, care management and discharge for home care, will present new challenges and opportunities for a diverse hospital-at-home player ecosystem. Join a panel of experts to learn from their experiences and walk away with actionable strategies for your organization.

To access Philips’ Telehealth Awareness Week Resource Center, visit this site. To learn more about Telehealth Awareness Week and how you can join us in promoting telehealth awareness, click here.
 
[1] Hakkennes S, Singh P. Gartner market guide for virtual care solutions. October 26, 2020