A Tool to Make Hospitalization More Equitable – Home Hospital

Hosted on January 16th, 2024

In this webinar, Dr. David Levine of Ariadne Labs shares more about how we might completely reimagine hospital care and make hospitalization in America more equitable for all.

A Tool to Make Hospitalization More Equitable is Now Leveraged at Over 300 U.S. Hospitals

from Rx Foundation’s Power is a Social Determinant of Health series

Session description: Unfortunately hospitals often deliver unsafe, expensive, and inequitable care. Evidence is growing that receiving hospital-level care at home, instead of in the brick-and-mortar hospital, can ameliorate each of these issues. “Home hospital” programs around the country are deploying hospital-level care at home to not only treat an acute illness but also to treat social determinants of health in the most effective place – a patient’s home. A research team at Ariadne Labs is exploring how this approach can be part of addressing some of our most pressing challenges, including rural healthcare, mental health, and care for people experiencing homelessness.

Join Dr. Levine for a conversation about how we might completely reimagine hospital care and make hospitalization in America more equitable for all.

Watch the Recording

Session Highlights

Problems with hospitalizations: unintended clinical consequences, poor inpatient access, and expensive

Home hospital = right care, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place

Home hospital care can work (1) for patients transferring home, in need of continued hospital-level care, (2) for patients visiting ER who can be treated at home, and (3) for patients in need of care who can receive it without ever leaving their home

Home hospital may be the most evidenced-based health service delivery innovation – 21% reduction in mortality, 24% reduction in readmissions, compared to general hospitalizations; proven model used globally, shown effective in multiple meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials

Home hospital care outcomes = lower utilization, lower cost of care, lower readmission rates, higher patient functioning, higher patient satisfaction rates

Home hospital care is meeting needs of all patients more equitably than care provided within hospital walls, including those of lower socioeconomic background, people with disabilities, and Black and Latinx populations; no glaring differences in outcomes, unlike traditional hospital care

Home hospital care can be adapted to serve rural communities, including those who have faced hospital closures

Ariadne Labs and Dr. Levine are adapting the home hospital model for (1) behavioral home hospital and (2) home hospital for those experiencing homelessness

More just hospital care centered on the home holds enormous potential; providers can address other social determinants of health at a patient’s home that they otherwise couldn’t within hospital walls

Resources

Ariadne Labs Home Hospital – resources, news, events, and more information on Dr. Levine and colleagues’ home hospital work
Hospital at Home Users Group – dynamic collaborative of Hospital at Home programs around the United States and Canada. We are sharing resources and best practices, working together to expand the reach of our programs, and developing the program and policy standards to inform regulatory and reimbursement policies necessary to spread this hopeful model broadly throughout North America.
Moving Health Home – a coalition made up of stakeholders working to change federal and state policy to enable the home to be a clinical site of care.
American Hospital Association’s Hospital-at-Home – a growing repository of resources on hospital-at-home, including case studies and podcast.

Research on Home Hospital

Speaker

Erica Andrade, President/CEO of El Centro

David Levine (he/him), MD MPH MA, Director of Home Hospital at Ariadne Labs

David Levine is a practicing general internist and clinician-investigator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Ariadne Labs, and Harvard Medical School. He is active in clinical and translational research through a focus on optimizing quality time at home by shifting care home, decentralizing care, digital health technology, and measuring the quality and experience of health care. He is medical director for strategy and innovation for the Brigham & Women’s Home Hospital and co-chair of the Hospital at Home Users Group. The home hospital team at Ariadne studies the scaling of home hospital care and rural home hospital care, among other areas.

Follow-us on social media for the most up-to-date news, resources, and events from the Rx Foundation and its partners.