MedStar Well being introduced Monday that its acute house care is now out there to Baltimore sufferers at its Franklin Sq. Medical Heart, Good Samaritan, Harbor and Union Memorial hospitals.
WHY IT MATTERS
By the collaboration, Dispatch Well being provides pre-scheduled house visits day by day, together with weekends and holidays, following discharge from emergency departments and inpatient hospital models, usually inside 72 hours, MedStar mentioned.
The service gives sufferers at MedStar's Baltimore facility a “seamless, monitored transition” to house, in keeping with Dr. Ethan Booker, MedStar's medical director of telehealth.
Dispatch has already made greater than 700 house visits to sufferers in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Booker mentioned in Monday's announcement. The expanded collaboration brings Dispatch house care to Baltimore for the primary time, added Dr. Phil Mitchell, the corporate's chief medical officer.
Based on MedStar, the corporate additionally provides same-day or next-day care following a referral from a telehealth go to.
Acute care situations handled vary from cardiology and respiratory to dermatology, musculoskeletal, neurological and extra. Excessive acuity house care by way of the service could embody medical remedies, similar to intravenous fluids and medicines, and sure diagnostic and laboratory providers.
THE BIGGEST TREND
Like many well being methods, MedStar shortly launched new telemedicine expertise in response to COVID-19, leading to 100,000 video visits within the first two months of use.
Two years in the past, researchers on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg College of Public Well being and different establishments, funded partly by the American Telemedicine Affiliation, discovered that sufferers with acute situations who had preliminary telehealth encounters appeared to require further follow-up visits. The researchers discovered that sufferers with acute medical situations who first sought care through telehealth had been extra prone to have a follow-up encounter, an emergency division encounter, and a hospital admission than those that sought care in individual.
Within the post-pandemic period, the medical group has realized that the transition to house is a vital a part of the continuum of care and is house hospitalization applications and distant affected person monitoring applied sciences to make transitions profitable and enhance entry and fairness for eligible sufferers.
“Assets from specialties like cardiology and endocrinology to providers like case administration and social providers are sometimes siled, making coordination much more troublesome,” mentioned Cindy Gaines, RN, director of medical transformation at Lumeon, a medical automation firm. . Healthcare IT Information.
“Increasing the continuum of care to combine house care will enhance affected person care outcomes, doctor satisfaction and monetary efficiency,” he mentioned.
IN THE REGISTER
“Sufferers take consolation in realizing that somebody will come to their house when they don’t want to remain within the hospital for medical causes, however they could nonetheless want care to bridge the hole between discharge and their subsequent physician's go to,” Booker mentioned in an announcement. launch.
“Collectively, we are going to assist optimize affected person care between the hospital and residential, enhance their care expertise, enhance well being outcomes and cut back prices each step of the best way,” Mitchell added.
Andrea Fox is a senior editor at Healthcare IT Information.
E mail: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT Information is printed by HIMSS Media.