Background: Hospital at home (HaH) delivers hospital-level care to acutely ill patients at home as a substitute for brick-and-mortar hospital care. The clinician and program characteristics of HaH programs worldwide are relatively unknown. We sought to describe the world's HaH clinicians and their programs' characteristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Complex chronic patients are prone to unplanned hospitalizations leading to a high burden on healthcare systems. To date, interventions to prevent unplanned admissions show inconclusive results. We report a qualitative analysis performed into the EU initiative JADECARE (2020-2023) to design a digitally enabled integrated care program aiming at preventing unplanned hospitalizations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Following the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' approval of the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver, an increasing number of health care organizations launched Home Hospital (HH) programs in the USA. Ongoing barriers include access to HH expertise and a standard, comprehensive set of implementation tools. We created the HH Early Adopters Accelerator to bring together a network of health care organizations to develop tools ("knowledge products") necessary for HH implementation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many advantages of hospital at home (HaH), as a modality of acute care, have been highlighted, but controversies exist regarding the cost-benefit trade-offs. The objective is to assess health outcomes and analytical costs of hospital avoidance (HaH-HA) in a consolidated service with over ten years of delivery of HaH in Barcelona (Spain).
Methods: A retrospective cost-consequence analysis of all first episodes of HaH-HA, directly admitted from the emergency room (ER) in 2017-2018, was carried out with a health system perspective.
Background: Hospital at home (HaH) was increasingly implemented in Catalonia (7.7 M citizens, Spain) achieving regional adoption within the 2011-2015 Health Plan. This study aimed to assess population-wide HaH outcomes over five years (2015-2019) in a consolidated regional program and provide context-independent recommendations for continuous quality improvement of the service.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResidents in rural areas face barriers to accessing acute care. Rural home hospital (RHH) or delivery of acute care at home could represent an important clinical care model. This study assessed the feasibility and acceptability of RHH as a substitute to traditional hospital care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Computer-assisted interpretation of single-lead ECG is the preliminary method for clinicians to flag and further evaluate an arrhythmia of clinical importance for acutely ill patients. Critical scrutiny of novel detection algorithms is lacking, particularly in external real-world data sets. This study's objective was to evaluate a hybrid machine learning model's ability to classify eight arrhythmias from a single-lead ECG signal from acutely ill patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Home hospital (HH) care is hospital-level substitutive care delivered at home for acutely ill patients who traditionally would be cared for in the hospital. Despite HH care programs operating successfully for years and scientific evidence of similar or better outcomes compared with bricks-and-mortar care, HH care outcomes in the United States for respiratory disease have not been evaluated.
Research Question: Do outcomes differ between patients admitted to HH care with acute respiratory illness vs those with other acute general medical conditions?
Study Design And Methods: This was a retrospective evaluation of prospectively collected data of patients admitted to HH care (2017-2021).
Background: Applicability of comprehensive assessment of integrated care services in real world settings is an unmet need. To this end, a Triple Aim evaluation of Hospital at Home (HaH), as use case, was done. As ancillary aim, we explored use of the approach for monitoring the impact of adoption of integrated care at health system level in Catalonia (Spain).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current health care models described in GesEPOC indicate the best way to make a correct diagnosis, the categorization of patients, the appropriate selection of the therapeutic strategy and the management and prevention of exacerbations. In addition, COPD involves several aspects that are crucial in an integrated approach to the health care of these patients. The evaluation of comorbidities in COPD patients represents a healthcare challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn addition to recommendations for pharmacological treatment stratified for risk and phenotype, the new 2021 edition of the Spanish COPD Guidelines (GesEPOC 2021) proposes a personalized approach to treatable traits, defined as a characteristic (clinical, physiological, or biological) that can be identified by diagnostic tests or biomarkers, for which a specific treatment is available. Some treatable traits, such as malnutrition, sedentarism, emphysema or respiratory failure, can be treated with non-pharmacological therapies, and this was not covered in detail in the guidelines. This section of GesEPOC 2021 includes a narrative update with recommendations on dietary treatment, physical activity, respiratory rehabilitation, oxygen therapy, non-invasive ventilation, volume reduction, and lung transplantation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Little is known about adult asthma patients' perspective of their disease burden. This study aimed to obtain a comprehensive picture of patient needs, evaluate their knowledge, source of information, and perception of the severity of their asthma, and compare these variables between severe (SA) and non-severe (NSA) asthma patients.
Methods: We conducted an online cross-sectional survey in Spain among asthma patients aged ≥18 years.
Background: During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreaks, health care workers (HCWs) are at a high risk of infection. Strategies to reduce in-hospital transmission between HCWs and to safely manage infected HCWs are lacking. Our aim was to describe an active strategy for the management of COVID-19 in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-infected HCWs and investigate its outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Med Internet Res
October 2020
Background: Home hospitalization is widely accepted as a cost-effective alternative to conventional hospitalization for selected patients. A recent analysis of the home hospitalization and early discharge (HH/ED) program at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona over a 10-year period demonstrated high levels of acceptance by patients and professionals, as well as health value-based generation at the provider and health-system levels. However, health risk assessment was identified as an unmet need with the potential to enhance clinical decision making.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlternatives to conventional hospitalization are needed to increase health systems resilience in the face of COVID-19 pandemic. Herein, we describe the characteristics and outcomes of 63 patients admitted to a single HaH during the peak of COVID-19 in Barcelona. Our results suggest that HaH seems to be a safe and efficacious alternative to conventional hospitalization for accurately selected patients with COVID-19.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2019
Home hospitalization (HH) is presented as a healthcare alternative capable of providing high standards of care when patients no longer need hospital facilities. Although HH seems to lower healthcare costs by shortening hospital stays and improving patient's quality of life, the lack of continuous observation at home may lead to complications in some patients. Since blood tests have been proven to provide relevant prognosis information in many diseases, this paper analyzes the impact of different sampling methods on the prediction of HH outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdherence to pharmacological treatment is a fundamental factor in the control of chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Poor disease control is associated with increased morbidity and mortality and higher health costs. A multicenter, observational cross-sectional study was performed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Comprehensive assessment of integrated care deployment constitutes a major challenge to ensure quality, sustainability and transferability of both healthcare policies and services in the transition toward a coordinated service delivery scenario. To this end, the manuscript articulates four different protocols aiming at assessing large-scale implementation of integrated care, which are being developed within the umbrella of the regional project Nextcare (2016-2019), undertaken to foster innovation in technologically-supported services for chronic multimorbid patients in Catalonia (ES) (7.5 M inhabitants).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMore than 1.5 million adults in the United States use supplemental oxygen for a variety of respiratory disorders to improve their quality of life and prolong survival. This document describes recommendations from a multidisciplinary workshop convened at the ATS International Conference in 2017 with the goal of optimizing home oxygen therapy for adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Home Hospitalization has proven efficacy, but its effectiveness and potential as an Integrated Care Service in a real world setting deserves to be explored.
Objective: To evaluate implementation and 10 years follow-up of Home Hospitalization and Early Discharge as an Integrated Care Service in an urban healthcare district in Barcelona.
Methods: Prospective study with pragmatic assessment.