Hospital at Home represents an innovative care delivery model that enables health systems to provide acute-level care in patients’ homes through a combination of digital technologies, remote monitoring, and in-person care teams. Digital solutions in this space integrate virtual care platforms, remote patient monitoring, logistics management, and advanced analytics to enable safe and effective hospital-level care delivery outside traditional facilities.
Hospital at home solutions
Non-emergent and urgent care | The ability to provide timely medical attention for acute, non-life-threatening conditions in the patient’s home, including daily physician visits (e.g., in-person, telemedicine) and 24/7 on-call support to address urgent medical needs without requiring hospital admission. Example companies: myLaurel, MedArrive, Dispatch Health |
Diagnostic services | The ability to perform various diagnostic tests in the patient’s home (e.g., point-of-care blood tests, ultrasounds, X-rays, and electrocardiograms) and ensuring timely diagnosis and treatment adjustments. Example companies: Sprinter Health, Getlabs |
Home delivered pharmacy | The ability to dispense, deliver, and administer medications directly to the patient’s home (e.g., including intravenous medications), ensuring proper dosing and adherence to prescribed treatments. Example companies: Capsule, Alto Pharmacy |
Home care nursing | The ability to provide skilled nursing care in the patient’s home (e.g., including two daily visits by registered nurses or mobile integrated health paramedics) and administer treatments, monitor patient condition, and provide education to patients and caregivers. Example companies: BrightStar Care |
Durable medical equipment (DME) and supply chain | The ability to efficiently deliver and manage durable medical equipment (DME) and necessary medical supplies to the patient’s home, ensuring that all required tools and resources for hospital-level care are available and properly maintained. Example companies: Parachute Health, Tomorrow Health |
Infusion | The ability to administer intravenous fluids, medications, and other infusion therapies in the patient’s home, including training caregivers on proper administration techniques when appropriate, to maintain hospital-level treatment protocols. Example companies: CareCentrix, Dispatch Health |
Rehab | The ability to provide rehabilitation services, such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, in the patient’s home environment, facilitating recovery and preventing functional decline associated with traditional hospital stays. Example companies: Luna, Spinezone |
Care delivery platforms | The ability to leverage a combination of remote monitoring technologies, telemedicine, and in-home healthcare services to deliver acute medical care, including diagnostics, treatment, and monitoring, to patients at home. Example companies: Medically Home, Contessa, Inbound Health, Dispatch Health, Current Health |
The case for digital in hospital at home
Healthcare organizations face an urgent need to extend acute care capacity beyond their physical walls. With inpatient units routinely operating over occupancy, emergency departments facing extended wait times, and patients increasingly seeking alternatives to traditional hospitalization, the facility-based care model has reached its limits. While Hospital at Home programs can effectively deliver acute care in patients’ homes, health systems struggle to scale these programs without robust digital infrastructure to manage distributed care teams, remote monitoring, and complex logistics.
Expand acute care capacity
Enable safe acute care at home
Drive scale through digital operations
Achieving meaningful financial impact from Hospital at Home requires operating at scale, which is impossible without robust digital infrastructure. The manual approach to Hospital at Home that worked for early pilot programs with 5-10 patients breaks down at larger volumes that health systems need to achieve ROI. Digital platforms have proven essential for scale as leading health systems have relied on a digitally-enabled command center to coordinate care across their entire service area, serving thousands of patients by operating as a “virtual hospital” within their EMR (AVIA Insights). The financial impact is significant with AVIA analysis showing that a 50-bed Hospital at Home program can generate $35M+ in annual revenue through a combination of direct program revenue and backfill of higher-acuity inpatient cases (AVIA Insights). This scale would be operationally impossible without digital solutions managing patient identification, care coordination, supply chain, and monitoring across distributed settings. Additionally, digital infrastructure enables programs to flex capacity up and down based on demand without the fixed costs of traditional hospital expansion, providing strategic advantages as health systems face increasing pressure to shift care to lower-cost settings.
Sources
- https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-hospital#:~:text=The%20average%20cost%20of%20hospital,beds%20for%20children%20and%20adults.
- https://www.hahusersgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Case-Study-Presbyterian-Healthcare-Services-Hospital-at-Home-Program.pdf
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10132045/
- https://medicallyhome.com/the-chassis/
- https://www.statnews.com/2022/07/15/congress-dont-let-hospital-care-at-home-shrivel-when-the-public-health-emergency-ends/
