Is Hospital at Home the Future of Healthcare?

Traditional healthcare organizations have a role to play in home healthcare, with remote patient monitoring devices, data integration and artificial intelligence supporting virtual care platform efforts. The implementation of new healthcare technologies, spurred into rapid adoption by the pandemic, are catalyzing new ways of thinking about care delivery, including care for patients at home rather than in a hospital setting.

Virtual care can help redefine the delivery of healthcare overall by enhancing the patient experience, improving health outcomes, lowering the cost of care and improving the work life of care providers. “Healthcare no longer needs to be defined by the walls of the hospital,” says Kristin Molina, business leader for enterprise care collaboration at Philips. “By leveraging interoperable, cloud-based solutions that inform data-driven decisions, clinicians can maintain visibility into patients’ well-being at home.”

Molina says that by focusing on effective data integration, AI-enabled clinical-decision support tools and wearables, critical patient data can be aggregated and transmitted directly to clinicians to help them make informed decisions about next steps for their patients’ care. “The visibility these connected technologies can provide clinicians is extremely valuable in guiding confident decisions about the most appropriate care setting for each patient and when intervention may be needed,” she says.