Medically Home’s Post

Medically Home is pleased to announce that it's own Pippa Shulman, DO, MPH, Chief Medical Officer will now also serve as Chief Strategy Officer. Pippa has played a formative role in creating and building the growing advanced-care-at-home industry as the clinical architect of Medically Home's model. Medically Home has enabled care for more than 40,000 patients since 2017 when it admitted its first patient at home. Today, Medically Home proudly leads this burgeoning field. Over the past three years, more than 50% of all patients admitted for hospital-at-home care under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) waiver have received their care through a Medically Home-enabled program. #hospitalathome #advancedcareathome #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare https://lnkd.in/grXzZSUN

Yesterday, CMS released a long anticipated report analyzing 11,907 unique hospital at home patients, representing 13,217 total episodes of care. More than half of the patients studied in this report received care through a Medically Home-enabled program. The upshot of the report is that episodes of care resulted in overall lower rates of mortality, lower rates of discharge to Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs), and higher satisfaction among patients and caregivers. This is consistent with the growing body of research on hospital-at-home care. Key Takeaways on Quality: - CMS noted that AHCAH patients had a lower 30-day mortality rate than comparable brick-and-mortar inpatients - Lower hospital-acquired condition (HAC) rates for AHCAH patients compared to inpatients across six types of HACs evaluated. - Mixed results for 30-day readmission rates: the AHCAH group had significantly higher readmission rates for two DRGs, while the inpatient group had higher readmission rates for three DRGs. On patient/caregiver experience: - 'CMS collected a variety of feedback from providers, clinicians, patients, families and caregivers...through email, letters, site visits, clinician focused virtual listening sessions, and program interviews...Patients described feeling more relaxed, less anxious, and less depressed at home, which seemed to aid their recovery...Caregivers noted that in-home care allowed them to be more involved in the care process, and they themselves felt more comfortable and less stressed when their loved ones were cared for at home. On clinician experience: - 'This positive feedback was mirrored by clinicians’ own experiences in providing care to patients under the AHCAH initiative. During the two listening sessions conducted with physicians, advanced practice providers (APPs) and nurses, participants described their own experience in serving patients through AHCAH as being professionally fulfilling, renewing the joy they experience in providing clinical care. On costs: - 'While inpatient episodes had a slightly longer average length of stay compared to brick-and-mortar inpatient episodes, they were associated with lower spending overall.' The report was delivered as an effort to extend the waiver that enables CMS reimbursement for hospital at home care is considered. https://lnkd.in/gmybDQQH. #hospitalathome #healthcareinnovation #advancedcareathome #acutecareathome

Medically Home's own Pippa Shulman DO, MPH, FAAFP is in Nashville today, speaking at the AHIP conference, serving on a panel exploring patient monitoring and care delivery in the home. The discussion will include how remote patient monitoring can be used to personalize care plans and interventions. Hospital at Home care has been shown to improve patient outcomes with one of the key drivers for those improved outcomes being the ability to work with the patient in their own environment, remotely and in person. Remote patient monitoring is part of that equation. Medically Home pioneered a model for hospital at home care at scale starting about 10 years ago, recognizing the insights that advanced care in the home could provide. Medically Home's model has now enabled hospital care for tens of thousands of patients in their homes. #hospitalathome, #healthcareinnovation https://lnkd.in/eMY5xdEj

In this episode of #RadioAdvisory, Matthew Richards, MD, Senior Medical Director for Medically Home is interviewed by Abby Burns about the important issue of bringing advanced care to the home. There are a lot of takeaways that could be highlighted from this 30-minute episode. An important one is about caregiver burden and unpaid labor in this country. Dr. Richards talks about it here saying: "There are some caregivers who unfortunately are overstretched and overburdened, and in some ways, a hospitalization becomes a form of respite to them...And when you approach them with this idea, it's hard to encapsulate that.. home health aid...can...supplement or [be a] replacement for some care. I also find that there is a pretty significant population that exists in the other portion of the bimodal group, which is those who would say, 'I'd absolutely love for my patient family member caregiver person that I'm caring for to be back at home because I know they're going to do better at home.' But then additionally, making sure we understand, [who] it is impacting. Early signs in the literature showed that [hospital at home care] isn't increasing the burden for patients and caregivers compared to [facilities-based care]. A study that came out of the group... that found that when they surveyed caregivers, they found that the brick-and-mortar has its own burden that is really unaccounted for...a brick-and-mortar hospitalization carries with it its own challenges, commuting back and forth to the hospital as an example. Abby Burns: "That's exactly where my mind went, especially we talked about social determinants of health earlier, and I think it's something in the realm of 5% of adults say that they have foregone medical care because of transportation issues. And when we're thinking about a higher acuity population, we can all think of family members that have needed rides to medical appointments, and maybe that's the middle of the workday and they don't have caregivers that can help them with that." Listen to the rest of the discussion here: https://lnkd.in/gKDSuwi9

Medically Home  VP, Clinical Strategy and Implementation, Linda V. DeCherrie M.D. was invited to serve as a panelist at this year's Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit in Chicago which took place last week. The session called, All That Jazz: Navigating The Shift To Care At Home, focused on realizing the full potential of the home as a site of care. Key takeaway: Panelists debated which elements are further along or further behind in moving care to the home, each providing letter grades A-F to where they believe we are currently in areas such as consumer experience, clinical efficacy and payment models. The area where there was agreement is that the patient experience and clinical efficacy for hospital at home care are positive while there is a ways to go with payment models. Dr. DeCherrie is a foremost authority on hospital at home care and is a frequent speaker and panelist on the topic. #hospitalathome

Housing instability should never limit access to care. Boston Medical Center (BMC) created a pathway to #HospitalatHome (HaH) care for a patient experiencing housing instability, ensuring they received needed care.

It is encouraging to see movement toward extending the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver initiative to provide Medicare and Medicaid patients with ongoing access to this mode of care.

Delia Halpin's patient story was featured earlier this week in the Bergen Record. Halpin is now one of many, many patients who have been able to receive needed hospital-level care at home as part of a Medically Home-partnered program like the one at Hackensack Meridian Health. Halpin told the Bergen Record that she recovered much faster than she would have in the hospital saying, "I'm not the most active person, but I don't want to just lie in a hospital bed for days doing nothing. I was at home. I could get up if needed. It was where I wanted to be." #hospitalathome https://lnkd.in/exK8YyXz

Earlier this year, Yale New Haven Health reported the milestone of seeing its 1000th patient through its Medically Home-partnered Hospital-at-Home program. Great to see ongoing reporting of this achievement in the Yale Daily News. Here is one of the highlights from the piece: "'Medically Home is a leader in this space of sort of figuring out how to translate inpatient care into deliverable appointments that can be carried out in patients’ homes,' Carly Brown, the program’s medical director, told the News." https://lnkd.in/gQsrzGaC #hospitalathome