At Home Patient Care
Studies by Dr. Leff and others show hospital-level care at home for certain conditions can be provided for 30% to 50% less than inpatient care with fewer complications, lower mortality rates and higher patient satisfaction.
New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital has developed a hospital-at-home program, HaH-plus, for some patients who show up at the emergency department or are referred by their primary-care doctors. A mobile acute-care team provides staffing, medical equipment, medications and lab tests at home, and is on call 24/7 if a condition worsens.
“For some admissions, we can avoid the emergency department, but for most admissions like pneumonia or dehydration or a skin infection, we evaluate them in the ED and then send them home in an ambulance with an IV in place,” says Linda DeCherrie, clinical director of Mount Sinai at Home. The HaH-plus program provides 30 days of care, including referring patients back to primary-care doctors and connecting them to services they need to avoid readmission.
Mount Sinai estimates that nationally, 575,000 cases each year could qualify for such a program, and treating just 20% of those could save Medicare $45 million annually. Mount Sinai is working with Contessa Health, which manages bundled-payment arrangements for hospital-at-home services, and plans to expand the home program to other areas, such as patients recovering from surgeries that would typically require an inpatient stay.
Richard Rakowski, chief executive of hospital-at-home provider Medically Home, estimates that eventually as much as 30% of care once provided in a hospital may be delivered at home.
One patient who saw a benefit from hospital-at-home care was Phyllis Camaratta, a heart-failure patient living in Malden, Mass. After three years in and out of the hospital, the 93-year-old says she didn’t want to go back after she became ill again last fall. When a nurse practitioner suggested a Medically Home program offered through her health-care provider Atrius Health, Ms. Camaratta agreed to try it.
At first, she says, she was a little overwhelmed by how many people showed up to provide care, check her condition, set up equipment and perform tests on portable machines. But she was impressed by the care, including a daily video consult via iPad so a doctor could see if her legs had too much swelling from fluid buildup.
At the end of a month, she was discharged from the program and referred to a new primary-care doctor. “We were so impressed that they could do all the same things they did in the hospital and have my mother be comfortable in her own bed and her own bathroom…with family and familiar surroundings,” says her daughter, Debbie Camaratta. “She was in a very fragile state, but The care really helped her bounce back to the best she can be at this age.”
All of the above scenarios also means that someone has to consider that these homes or apartment units must have the infrastructure to facilitate this type of care ie. Internet or some other communication mechanizm.
Another Alternative – Build smaller facilities
To offer services and expand in locales where it doesn’t make sense to build a new hospital, health systems are building free-standing emergency rooms and micro hospitals, commonly called neighborhood hospitals. The scope of services varies, but micro hospitals usually include emergency rooms and beds for short-stay recovery.
Houston-based Emerus Holdings Inc. partners with big health systems to open micro hospitals. Commonly called neighborhood hospitals, they typically anchor a two- or three-story “healthplex” buildings with emergency care, labor and delivery, surgical procedures and lab and radiology services. For example, it has opened four in partnership with Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican, which operates hospitals and other medical facilities in southern Nevada, allowing the system to expand services to a broader area around Las Vegas. And Emerus is joining with Highmark Health, which includes health plans and the Allegheny Health Network, operator of West Penn Hospital, to build multiple neighborhood hospitals in western Pennsylvania.
Typically, 92% of patients who come to the micro hospitals are treated and sent home in an average of 90 minutes, and 8% are admitted overnight for care such as intravenous-medication administration, according to Chief Executive Craig Goguen. If need be, patients can be transferred to higher-level care, such as a hospital cardiac-catheterization lab, sometimes in less time than it takes in a hospital’s own emergency room, Mr. Goguen says.
Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan, is completing a nearly 300,000-square-foot center in Brighton, Mich., which will house more than 40 specialty services for adults and children, cancer treatment, operating rooms and a short-stay unit. Eventually, most patients who aren’t acutely ill “will be getting care in an outpatient center that can do everything short of admitting you, and maybe just watch you overnight,” says David A. Spahlinger, president of the University of Michigan health system.
Ochsner Health System, Louisiana’s largest nonprofit academic health system, has 30 owned, managed or affiliated hospitals. President and Chief Executive Warner Thomas says 80% of its capital expenditures are going to outpatient clinics, and “I don’t see us building new hospitals.”
In the Baton Rouge area, for example, in addition to a recently opened outpatient cancer center, it is developing a medical office building with more primary-care and diagnostic and specialty clinics. Attached to the building will be a 10-bed inpatient hospital and surgical center, which Mr. Thomas says will offer procedures such as knee replacements requiring stays of 24 hours or less.
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