Medical City Healthcare and Resilient Healthcare, a strong home-based healthcare provider, recently joined to provide hospital-at-home services.
Before leaving the hospital and transitioning to their home, eligible patients are attached to a live remote patient monitoring (RPM) equipment that continually monitors blood pressure.
“They’re recognized as a likely contender for hospital-at-home care at the hospital,” said Jackleen Samuel, president and CEO of Resilient. “We set up a tablet and our RPM device for them.” We keep an eye on them the entire route home and during their period on our service. They’re linked to a nurse station that’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is separate from our command centre.”
Resilient has a standard home health division and also a hospital-at-home division. OTs, PTs, dietary specialists, speech therapists, and others make up Resilient’s interdisciplinary team.
Medical City Healthcare, on the other hand, is among North Texas’ biggest healthcare systems. 16 hospitals, 11 ambulatory surgical centres, 4 off-campus emergency care, and CareNow Emergency Care facilities make up the group. Approximately 5,000 specialists, 6,000 nurses, and 17,000 workers make up the Medical City Medical group.
The Centers for Medicaid Services (CMS) and Medicare has approved Medical City Healthcare to engage in the Acute Hospital at Home Program, making it the first chain of hospitals in Texas to do so. As of Nov. 8, the waiver programme had welcomed 83 health systems and 187 hospitals from 34 states as members.
According to Brian Chace, vice president of operations at Resilient, COPD and CHF patients are normally strong candidates for hospital-at-home care.
“These are diagnoses where patients frequently return to the hospital owing to exacerbations,” Chace explained to HHCN. “Those are the patients we can greatly assist go home and on services so they don’t have to go back to the hospital around 30 days.”
If a patient has any issues or queries when they are at home, the nurse station contacts the doctor.
Patients receive medicines, in-person nurse visits, IV injections, and food as needed as part of the programme.
“We have fourteen different vitals and are continuously monitoring them, as well as getting their activity level,” Samuel explained. “I believe our patients are properly supervised on our systems than on typical hospital measures as we obtain their vital signs in every 5 seconds or less.”
Doctors are also sent into patients’ homes when they have nutritional needs, therapeutic needs, or if they really want to visit a therapist.
The discharge process, like the rest of the programme, is modelled after what might happen in a hospitalization.