KY Health System to Implement Hospital-at-Home Program

To expand access to hospital services, Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) plans to implement a home hospital program that uses Biofourmis' technology to deliver quality acute hospital-level care in patients' homes.

ARH is a rural, non-profit healthcare system that includes 14 hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Based in Boston, Biofourmis artificial intelligence-driven tools to support remote patient monitoring and at-home care.

Rural communities traditionally have not had access to adequate care, a trend that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government estimates that 80 percent of rural America is medically underserved, according to the news release.

To combat this, ARH is creating a home hospital program that allows caregivers to provide hospital-level care to patients as they remain in their homes.

The program will begin with 10 virtual beds, which will serve approximately 30 patients monthly. Patients will receive biosensors, blood-pressure cuffs, pulse oximeters, and weight scales to gather physiologic data. Biofourmis will also aid ARH in creating a patient-centric companion app.

Data collected from patients will be transmitted to Biofourmis' AI-powered Biovitals Analytics Engine, which establishes a patient baseline through machine learning and provides real-time notifications to clinicians if patients' vital signs change.

"Biofourmis' technology, which has been demonstrated to improve outcomes and decrease costs, has been successfully deployed in urban and rural home hospital programs. The solution will give us the digital health and remote clinical support we need to help make our program a success so that we can eventually expand to more hospitals and patients,” said Maria B. Braman, MD, vice president, medical affairs, and chief medical officer of ARH, in the news release.

ARH, along with Illinois-based Blessing Health System, are the only two US participants selected for the Rural Home Hospital project, a joint venture of the Harvard T.J. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital, which aims to apply lessons learned from hospital-at-home programs launched in urban communities to build a nationwide program for rural ones. 

As part of the project, researchers will evaluate the hospital-at-home model in a three-year randomized controlled trial. At ARH, half the trial patients will receive facility-based care and the other half home-based care.

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to expand care access in rural areas. 

In October 2021, the House of Representatives introduced the Rural Telehealth Access Task Force Act, which plans to study how telehealth is used in rural areas of the country, how improvement can be made, and what programs have the potential to promote expansion.

In January, HHS provided a total of $13 million in grants through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) to support various organizations working on expanding behavioral healthcare access in rural areas.