Hospital at home programs
Hospital at home refers to providing acute-level care in patients’ homes. Hospital-at-home programs offer reduced infection risks, improved patient comfort, and cost-effectiveness compared to building new facilities.
Effective hospital at home requires the support of interconnected teams and technologies—see this proposed virtual hospital structure from Medically Home.
While the element of distributed care is not new, it is gaining traction for a few reasons:
- Hospitals face capacity challenges, staff shortages, and financial constraints.
- The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual care, telehealth, and other flexible ways to offer care.
- Patients tend to prefer home environments over hospital stays.
- Government and regulatory agencies encourage the trend with initiatives like Acute Hospital Care at Home
- Technology advancements have made acute-level care at home more possible than ever before
Implementing hospital-at-home programs is not easy. It requires a significant mindset shift for hospital administrators and a substantial upfront investment. But its significant ROI and benefits for patient care make it an attractive option for many healthcare providers. For instance, Atrium Health reports high patient satisfaction and views hospital at home programs as a driver of their 110-120% occupancy rates.
Personalized healthcare, preventive care, and precision treatments
Healthcare industry experts and researchers continue to discover new ways to deliver excellent care. Here are a few patient care trends to watch:
Personalized care considers a patient’s unique circumstances, preferences, and needs when designing a treatment plan. Personalized care goes beyond medical history; it adds comprehensive health records to other lifestyle factors like work environment, social support systems, and personal goals. For instance, a physician creating a personalized care plan for diabetes management might consider not only the patient’s A1C/blood sugar but also their work schedule, dietary preferences, daily activity level, and family support structure. This approach recognizes the importance of social determinants of health in patient outcomes. This level of personalization helps ensure healthcare interventions are practical and attainable on an individual level, in addition to clinically sound.
Preventive care is a proactive approach of avoiding health issues and illnesses before they occur, rather than a reactive approach of treating symptoms after they appear. Preventive care includes vaccinations to boost immunity against common diseases, genetic testing to identify potential health risks, therapy to address mental health concerns, and wellness strategies to improve general patient health. Preventive care helps patients (and providers) address issues early, when they are easier and less costly to treat.
Precision care is another level of personalized healthcare that uses advanced diagnostics and therapeutics to tailor treatments to individual patients. Precision care often involves the use of emerging healthcare technology like genetic testing, biomarker analysis, and AI-assisted diagnostics to find the best possible treatment. For example, oncologists can analyze a tumor’s genetic profile to find the most effective targeted therapy, rather than trying one-size-fits-all treatments with their own side effects.
Overall wellness will also continue to shape healthcare in the future. Focusing on wellness means considering all aspects of a person’s physical, mental, and social well-being—not simply the illness or issue that brings them to the doctor today. Providers are emphasizing the role of sleep, nutrition, physical activity, stress management, and healthy connections in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and preventing diseases. Including wellness in the healthcare discussion reinforces the trend toward patients who are more actively engaged in their own care.
Modifications to payer schemes
Healthcare payers finance and manage healthcare services for individuals and groups. Payers include insurance companies, government programs (like Medicare and Medicaid), and self-insured employers.
Payer schemes are always evolving due to legislative action, administrative and regulatory priorities, and insurer decisions. Plus, emerging forms of care require new payer structures.
For example, consider group visits, in which providers schedule several appointments back-to-back with multiple patients who have similar conditions. After an individual evaluation in a private exam room, the patients participate in a group discussion. People who have experienced this kind of participatory care report several benefits:
- Patients talk about their experiences and hear from others, which is an empowering experience for many.
- The healthcare providers who facilitate the group discussion hear insights that don’t come up in 1:1 patient-provider interactions.
- Patient health outcomes improve more than they do through “traditional” appointments.
Group visits are far from the only type of care that requires another look from payers. Payers are grappling with new treatment options like digital therapeutics (DTx); newly discovered treatments, drugs, and off-label uses; an increased focus on wellness activities; and distributed care sites like mobile health clinics on a regular basis. These changes may start with large, organized care systems like HMOs and large medical systems, then spread to other, smaller systems in other regions when proven successful.
Shortage of skilled healthcare providers and operations staff
The labor shortage in healthcare has been a problem for some time, and it doesn’t show signs of slowing down. Skilled workers are in high demand and facing high levels of stress—and now more than four in ten clinicians are actively considering leaving the industry.
With projected shortages in thousands of roles, healthcare organizations must prioritize recruiting and retaining great staff. This means offering competitive pay, benefits, flexibility in scheduling, and tech tools that make work easier.
Healthcare organizations are also using contingent workers, contractors, temporary staff, and non-FTE workers to fill gaps created by staff turnover. But this is a delicate balance—providers must invest time in finding and supervising contingent workers, as well as respect the differences between employees and contingent workers.
When pursuing new technology or processes, healthcare organizations that put workers first will see the best results. Consider this example from KPMG: a large U.S. health facility operator has a team of data scientists and engineers walking the halls of its facilities, observing the daily struggles of nurses and doctors. They come back to staff days later—not months—with solutions. This initiative helped build rapport with staff, freed up time for patient care, and helped staff get home to their loved ones faster.
When done right, and with the feedback of skilled workers, healthcare organizations can use tech to support workers and navigate a tight labor market.
Focus on work-life balance and overall well-being of staff
At a time when the skilled labor force is smaller than healthcare industry experts would like, there is a renewed focus on the work-life balance and overall well-being of healthcare staff.
This is a difficult challenge—but for some workers, technology is a clear solution. “I would like to make more active use of automated systems to address our workforce crisis, which is increasingly aging and there is a shortage of manpower,” said an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse quoted in a GE Healthcare study.
New ways of delivering care are giving workers a chance to rethink how and where they work:
- Virtual visits for providers and remote work technology for other staff can provide more flexibility in schedules and more time at home
- Task automation means less time on repetitive, low-skill work (like sending a message to patients X days after a certain procedure) and more time with patients or on complex tasks
- Online registration and check-in means patients confirm their information and upload a picture of their insurance card before the visit, saving time for front-desk staff
Going forward, look for healthcare workers to continue to consider their well-being in the way they structure and schedule their work. For example, skilled workers may consider concierge medicine, where patients pay a retainer fee to their physician or specialist to receive more personalized care and more direct, frequent access to their provider. This is good for providers, who are less affected by declining payer reimbursements. But concierge healthcare is out of reach for many people. To find the right balance, some providers opt for hybried concierge models, where a small percentage of patients pay for extra access, and the provider continues to see other patients, too. This approach can help providers achieve a better work-life balance without cutting off patients who cannot afford concierge-level service.
Look for new and distributed care models to emerge as popular choices for staff, especially if they provide a new level of work-life balance. Organizations that want to attract and retain a highly skilled workforce with diverse experience will need to offer more creative and flexible work options to keep workers satisfied. Healthcare providers will also continue to invest in employee wellness programs that help reinforce workers’ overall well-being.
Get ready for the future of healthcare
New technologies, modes of care, and patients’ needs will continue to shape healthcare services. As the industry evolves, healthcare organizations and technology providers must prioritize innovation and interoperability.
Healthcare providers can prepare for the future by investing in user-friendly, interconnected tech. Healthcare leaders should push for open EMR systems and make purchasing decisions accordingly. All healthcare workers—clinicians, IT teams, patient care representatives, and administrative staff—should advocate for open systems that support their work.
Technology providers play a key role in the connected and personalized future of healthcare. Going forward, leading health tech companies will put interoperability at the core of their product development. An open system has greater functionality and adaptability to different healthcare settings, and it helps meet industry, regulatory, and consumer expectations.
What else should healthcare leaders look for in their tech? Read our ebook to learn more → Trends in the Shifting Point of Care: What you need to know when evaluating new tech.
