Reducing the Cost of Care; Provide Home Care for Sicker Patients with Remote Monitoring

Although changes often come slowly in healthcare, we are now in the midst of the following three major changes in the field: (1) reduction in inpatient admissions that is driving the growth of bedless or mini-hospitals; (2) provision of first-tier outpatient care in walk-in clinics such as CVS/MinuteClinics; (3) the transfer of some inpatient care to patients' homes, partly as a cost-reduction strategy. This latter topic was previously covered in one of my blog notes (see:Some Details about Hospital-at-Home (HaH) Services for Selected ER Patients) and also in a recent article (see:Commentary: Reducing the cost of acute care by going home). Below is a quote from the latter:An ideal way to...[reduce healthcare costs while increasing quality] is to keep patients out of the hospital whenever possible through proactive, preventive care. Yet even when this fails and patients do need acute care, we can successfully treat many of them outside the hospital.Hospital at Home is an innovative program that provides hospital-level service in the patient's own home, at a fraction of the cost of hospitalization. Health systems across the country are prepared to launch such programs, which would save Medicare hundreds of millions of dollars, once an appropriate payment model is in place.Elderly patients with illnesses such as pneumonia, asthma and urinary tract infections, can be treated at home where they face less risk of falling, sleep better, receive better nutri...

Source: Lab Soft News - January 4, 2019 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Cost of Healthcare Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Quality of Care Telemedicine Source Type: blogs