A Boston-based hospital has kicked off a program in which it will evaluate whether a mix of continuous connected patient monitoring and clinicians is able to reduce hospitalizations for common medical admissions.
The Home Hospital pilot, which will take place at Partners HealthCare Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is being led by David Levine, MD, MA, a physician who practices at the hospital. The hospital team is working with two vendors to implement the program, Vital Connect and physIQ. Vital Connect is supplying a biosensor that will continuously stream patient vital signs; those vital signs, in turn, will be analyzed and viewable through physIQ’s physiology analytics platform.
The Home Hospital pilot is one of two efforts planned by the team to analyze how technology in home-based care can treat patients who might otherwise have been admitted to the hospital. For this initiative, a randomized controlled trial, patients diagnosed at the BWH Emergency Department with exacerbation of heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, cellulitis or complicated urinary tract infection are being placed at home with the Vital Connect/physIQ solution and receive daily clinician visits.
The primary aim of this program, according to participants, is to demonstrate that the in-home model they’ve proposed can provide appropriate care at a lower cost at home, as well as improving outcomes measures such as health related quality of life, patient safety and quality and overall patient experience.
According to a written statement, the first phase of the initiative began in September of this year involves roughly 60 patients, half of whom are receiving traditional in-hospital care, while the other half are being treated at home. With the early phase looking at the success, the hospital will probably scale up to including 500 patients in the pilot in early 2017.
Expect to see more hospital-based connected care options like these emerge over the next year or two, as they’re just too promising to ignore at this point.
Perhaps the most advanced I’ve written about to date must be the Chesterfield, Mo-based Mercy Virtual Care Center, which describes itself as a “hospital without beds.” The $54M Virtual Care Center, which launched in October 2015, employs 330 staffers providing a variety of telehealth services, including virtual hospitalists, telestroke and perhaps most relevant to this story, the “home monitoring” service, which provides continuous monitoring for more than 3,800 patients.
My general impression is that few hospitals are ready to make the kind of commitment Mercy did, but that most are curious and some quite interested in actively implementing connected care and monitoring as a significant part of their service line. It’s my guess that it won’t take many more successful tests to convince wide swath of hospitals to get off the fence and join them.
