Moving Hospital Care Into the Home: A Pandemic-Fueled Surge

Home-based hospital care evolved in a big way in 2020 as hospital and health system leaders saw the opportunity to send patients home with the right tools to care for them, when possible, while also preserving critical resources and protecting the vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Historically, there have been different variations of the hospital-at-home model going back to the mid-1990s, and while programs have ramped up in recent years, the crisis has caused interest to skyrocket. Although it’s not for everyone or every condition, patient care leaders are increasingly seeing hospital-at-home programs as one viable solution to bending healthcare’s unsustainable cost curve: one study published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine reviewed 43 hospital-at-home patients and 48 patients receiving traditional hospital care, finding that hospital-at-home care was 38 percent less costly than traditional hospital care. The researchers found that only 7 percent of hospital-at-home patients were readmitted within 30-days, compared to 23 percent of patients receiving traditional hospital care.

During a recent virtual panel discussion on moving care delivery into the home, presented by Healthcare Innovation, Levine said his organization opted against it since there were lots of PPE supply issues in Boston early on in the pandemic, which would have made it tough to appropriately care for COVID patients in their homes. But by providing care for patients with infections, heart failure exacerbations, and many other conditions, Brigham was still able to create a lot of capacity for the hospital during the pandemic.