Hospital At Home - from A to Z
Updated: Feb 9
Hospital at home - Biobeat's advantages
Hospital at home (HaH) - Definition
Hospital at Home (HaH) is a high-quality patient care model, which allows medical-level care in a patient's home. HaH programs, run by the healthcare providers, enable delivering hospital-level care for various acute conditions. More and more providers nowadays are in search of Remote Patient/Physiological Monitoring (RPM) tools/devices to gather the appropriate data to allow a better patient-focus care tailored for each individual.
Overview
In 1995, Dr. John Burton of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Dr. Donna Regenstreif of The John A Hartford Foundation developed a new method to provide safe and effective hospital-level care in the home. From 1996-1998, feasibility, cost-effectiveness and safety of a Hospital at Home method was proven with a pilot study comprised of 17 patients. Throughout the 2000’s several clinical studies were conducted to further assess the feasibility of such a concept, as well as its level of safety and the efficacy of treatment within this setting. In 2015, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York won a grant for testing H@H to inform a possible 30-day bundle payment model for fee-for-service Medicare, funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
COVID -19 Effect
The COVID-19 pandemic stressed the necessity for such programs, delivering a high-level care from a safe distance. With the enduring shortage of manpower and overflow of patients rushing in to the hospitals and clinics, the medical staff are overwhelmed by the number of cases, underscoring the excess time invested in manually collection of the patients' vital signs.
Home Hospitalization programs conducted from the comfort of the patient’s already show that treatment delivered at home while the patients are properly monitored is safer, cheaper, and more effective than traditional hospital care, especially for patients who are vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections and other complications of inpatient care: (1)
Effectively reducing complications associated with longer LOS and readmissions
Reducing more than 30% of costs
Decrease average hospitalizations (LOS of 3.2 vs 4.9 /days).
Fewer laboratory and diagnostic tests compared to similar patients in-hospital
To allow proper hospitalization of patients at home, there is a need for accurate and efficient medical-grade monitoring devices. While there are many devices out there that provide only some of the basic parameters, other non-medical grade/wellness devices are on the rise as they are more cost accessible to the end consumer and payers when looking at current reimbursement models. However, none fully covers the needed set of physiological parameters to allow proper H@H monitoring. Healthcare providers are still in constant search of medical-grade, regulatory-cleared devices to issue Home Hopitalization programs with hospital-level care.
As a result of this need, the digital health industry has developed partial solutions to address the gaps, and deliver a more personalized care at the point-of-care, such as:
point-of-care diagnosis
mobile healthcare
telemedicine solutions
tele- consultation
remote monitoring,
wearables & IOT and more.
Home Hospitalization - Biobeat's Advantages
The advantages and benefits of the Biobeat platform are:
13 medical vital signs: non-invasive cuffless blood pressure, pulse rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation, temperature, stroke volume, cardiac output, single channel ECG, and more.
Medical grade regulation clearance: the platform is FDA-cleared for cuffless non-invasive blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, stroke volume, cardiac output and SpO2, and CE Mark approved for all 13 parameters.
In-house developed health-AI platform, with an automated real-time early warning score (EWS) system that incorporates advanced algorithms to provide alerts on patients' health status and potential deterioration.
Decision support tool - Access to the patients' data provides advanced insights based on trends and patterns which brings efficiency into the process of healthcare delivery.
Data analysis - Optimization of data collection, providing medical staff the required clinical data when required.
Personalized care - The data collected via the Biobeat devices allow healthcare practitioners to adopt a data-driven personalized approach.
References:
1. B. Leff, L. Burton, S. L. Mader et al., "Hospital at Home: Feasibility and Outcomes of a Program to Provide Hospital-Level Care at Home for Acutely Ill Older Patients," Annals of Internal Medicine”, Dec. 2005 143(11):798–808.