Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association MEMBER MOMENTS: A Focus on UMass Memorial Health’s Hospital-at-Home Program
UMass Memorial Health’s hospital-at-home program was featured recently in this Becker’s article.
“Being a hospitalist for my entire career, the light bulb moment for me was, ‘Geez, these patients really have better outcomes,'” UMass’ Chief Quality and Clinical Informatics Officer Eric Alper, M.D., told Becker’s. “It’s as good a tool for improving quality of care as any other tool we could possibly have for improving acute care-related harm. My personal bias is we ought to be doing everything we can to get as many patients as possible into the hospital-at-home approach because of that, but also because of our overcrowded healthcare system.”
The system’s hospital-at-home program cost between $1.5 million and $2 million to launch and serves an average of 15 to 20 patients per day. UMass Memorial partners with Best Buy’s Current Health on the remote patient monitoring technology, but uses its own physicians and nurses for the program.
According to Alper, the program has saved more than 4,700 hospital days and has lower rates of mortality, infections, readmissions, harm from falls, and transfers to skilled nursing facilities than in-hospital care.