18 Health Systems Collaborate to Develop Hospital-at-Home Tools

Eighteen health systems participated in the first phase of the Home Hospital Early Adopters Accelerator, a program created by Adriadne Labs in collaboration with CaroNova to help providers develop home hospital tools.

The number of hospitals providing at-home acute care has shot up in recent years. The primary reason for this is the addition of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver to the Hospital Without Walls initiative in November 2020. More than 100 health systems spanning 36 states are currently approved for the program.  

The 40-week accelerator program included 91 representatives from 18 health systems in the US and South Africa. Some US-based health systems that participated were CaroMont Health, Cape Fear Valley, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, UNC Health, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Novant Health. 

Together, they created a set of 20 tools to support home hospital programs, including criteria for identifying patients who are eligible for home hospital services and workflows for admissions, IV medications, and potential escalation of care. The group also developed solutions for food services and oxygen use.

The health systems will use these tools to build or expand their hospital-at-home programs.

"Studies have shown that home hospital care translates to less readmission, better experience, and improved physical activity for patients, not to mention capacity creation for strained hospitals," said David Levine, MD, leader of the accelerator, and a practicing general internist and investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in a press release. "With the tools that the Accelerator has developed over the last 40 weeks, I am excited to see these agile institutions deliver acute care at home with precision."

A joint center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Ariadne Labs aims to solve healthcare problems using human-centered design and frontline clinical experience.

Created by The Duke Endowment, the North Carolina Healthcare Association, and the South Carolina Hospital Association, CaroNova aims to enhance healthcare in the Carolinas.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, providers ramped up at-home care programs, in part, to ensure access to care as lockdowns proliferated.

In July, Tampa General Hospital added an at-home acute care option, through which patients received hospital-level care at home. The program includes two daily visits with a clinical team member and RPM services, which enables the remote tracking of vital signs.

A study published in July showed that data from a remote patient monitoring system implemented at Froedtert and Medical College of Wisconsin Health Network provided several patient care benefits, such as symptom tracking and continuous monitoring from a care team. Researchers found that the program reduced hospitalizations and intensive care use.