Hospital-at-Home Concepts Gaining Traction as COVID Again Overloads Hospitals and Clinics

The omicron variant finds hospitals and doctor’s offices straining under the weight of another heavy wave of COVID cases, lending momentum to alternate care models. Among those, the hospital-at-home model is ramping up amid the current reordering of healthcare delivery.

Like many other concepts, hospital-at-home isn’t new — Johns Hopkins Health first introduced such services in the 1990s — but it’s failed to scale until the confluence of a health crisis and new digital technologies created renewed interest and investment around this model.

On Monday (Jan. 10), hospital-at-home platform Medically Home announced a new $110 million fundraise led by Baxter International, Cardinal Health and Global Medical Response. Medically Home’s platform provides digital coordination between devices, nurses and clinicians working in-home with physicians and resources in medical facilities, enabling more hospital-level diagnosis and treatment to occur in home.

Per the announcement, “The Medically Home model unlocks patients’ homes as safe alternative sites to receive high and lower acuity care across the care continuum in the comfort and convenience of their homes. This capability is designed to increase health system capacity and resiliency, while meeting the needs and wants of patients, who often prefer to be cared for at home or in a homelike setting.”

In Q2 2021, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente led a strategic investment in Medically Home and both are also participating in this new round. It’s part of a broader trend that takes in the mounting aging in place movement, enabled by connected digital technologies.

Mayo Clinic president and CEO Gianrico Farrugia, M.D. said, “Our partnership with Kaiser Permanente and Medically Home will create the next generation of patient-centric, compassionate health care that seamlessly integrates advanced technology with clinical expertise. By bringing best-in-class clinicians and services to patients in their homes, we’ll be able to provide more people with individualized care that’s tailored to meet their specific needs.”

Pointing to rising demand for a “next-generation clinical workforce that combines centralized care oversight (guided by physicians and nurses in medical command centers) with field clinicians (nurses, paramedics, and technicians), who work seamlessly as a team,” the announcement may also mark an inflection point in home healthcare delivery.

“The addition of these strategic national partners powerfully strengthens our logistics capability which our health system providers need to safely and reliably care for patients in their homes. The accelerating decentralization of high acuity care from hospitals and other institutional sites to an ever-increasing number of patient’s homes enabled by Medically Home, validates the importance of an ecosystem of health care partners working together on behalf of patients and the clinicians that care for them across the country,” said Rami Karjian, CEO of Medically Home.

In October 2021, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and Medically Home founded the Advanced Care at Home Coalition to widely scale more flexible delivery of hospital-grade care.

More consumers are seeking and using digital healthcare options that avoid hospitals.

The Access Channel: How Healthcare Financing Keeps Patients Engaged, a PYMNTS report with research sponsored by CareCredit, notes that “consumers have interacted digitally with their healthcare services providers more than ever since the global health crisis, with many patients using options such as teleconferencing (37 percent), texting (21 percent) and online patient portals (33 percent) at record levels — making messaging about payment options easier to deliver. Here are five ways healthcare services providers can transform digital tools into an access channel for patients.”

Get the study: The Access Channel: How Healthcare Financing Keeps Patients Engaged