Discovery Health heads to Barcelona to share data from our Hospital at Home programme

Discovery Hospital at Home on the world stage! Earlier this month,  Lara Wallett , Head of Discovery Healthcare Services, represented us at the World Hospital at Home Congress in Barcelona, Spain. We are extremely proud of the progress of our Hospital at Home service, which leads the way globally with many of the big names in healthcare. 

This event offered Lara a unique opportunity to learn from and network with other thought leaders in the global at-home hospital care arena.

Dr Maulik Majmudar, M.D. is the Chief Medical Officer of Biofourmis USA, our technology partner for Hospital at Home. This technology is an essential and central component of our service, considering the importance of remote monitoring, and sophisticated alert identification. During the conference, Lara and Dr Maulik, presented at a panel discussion, sharing insights from the Discovery Hospital at Home programme, which has been running for about one year. 

Our programme provides care for a range of medical and post-surgical conditions that would otherwise require hospital admission. It merges traditional multi-disciplinary hospitalisation with cutting edge, remote-monitoring medical technology. Artificial intelligence in the monitoring systems gives a predictive view of a patient’s disease trajectory, ensuring early detection of issues arising to empower the clinical team to intervene early, and accurately track patient status and progress. Patients also access 24-7 real-time monitoring and care with virtual doctors’ consultations, in-person nurse visits at home, and other personalised support.

Reporting back on a year of Discovery Hospital at Home

We carefully track our Discovery Hospital at Home patient outcomes against both local and international benchmarks. Lara’s presentation to the international community demonstrated that:

• Since January 2022, the primary diagnoses treated through Hospital at Home admission have been Pneumonia (the majority of cases), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Urinary Tract Infection, Cellulitis, Heart failure, Diabetes and COVID-19.  
• Global hospital at home programmes show an average length of stay of 4.5 days and we are in the ballpark at 5.3 days. 
• 41% of our patients were treated at home from start to end, with an admission into hospital completely avoided. 
• 59% were stabilised in hospital before being transitioned to admission through Hospital at Home, as required by their clinical circumstances and as guided by their treating specialists. 
• Relative to in-hospital admission costs, Hospital at Home came in at 29% to 47% lower cost per episode of care.
• 92% of the patients admitted to Hospital at Home were fully discharged once their treatment ended. The remaining 8% were re-admitted for in-hospital care, primarily due to disease progression. The predictive analytics built into Discovery Hospital at Home’s monitoring technology suitably identified their need for escalated care well in advance of any high risk clinical scenarios at home.
• Two key measures of Hospital at Home’s safety and outcomes are Emergency Room (ER) visit and readmission rates post discharge:

-Following discharge, 4% of Discovery Hospital at Home patients required an ER visit, relative to 11% of risk-adjusted similar patients, who were treated in-hospital.

-6% of Hospital at Home patients required re-admission versus 2% readmission among people who were treated in-hospital for the same conditions. 

We never rest on our laurels - there is always room for improvement. 

Looking forward, we aim to boost the post-discharge support we offer, to counter the likelihood of readmissions. 

We continue to work to scale the service, with a view to admitting a total of 50,000 patients to Hospital at Home by 2025.

Global hospital-at-home programmes demonstrate high safety with superior outcomes at lower cost

In our post-Covid healthcare systems, the world’s leading medical facilities – from Mayo Clinic to Cleveland Clinic, Israel’s Sheba Medical Centre and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard’s world-renowned teaching hospital in Boston), and many more - are running hospital-at-home programmes with exceptional outcomes, demonstrating both excellent safety and outcomes, and high patient appreciation. 

The scale of these offerings is really exciting. For example, more than 100,000 patients have been treated in National Health Service (NHS) virtual wards[1] (as the NHS refers to their at-home hospital care offering) in the UK in the past year, and 16,000 patients in January 2023 alone. There are now more than 340 virtual ward programmes across England – 58 opened in January – including a total of 7,653 virtual beds.  This is clearly a globalising trend in care.

Globally, hospital-at-home programmes have been extensively studied and reported on through randomised controlled trials and other published research. The programmes are consistently demonstrating high safety with superior outcomes, at lower cost. It’s exciting to see that against the outcomes published in these robust trials, our programs outcomes are on par with our international counterparts demonstrating the scientific and evidenced-based rigour of hospital-at-home, globally. 

What’s interesting is that in most countries, at-home hospital care is a way to provide additional hospital capacity without building new hospitals. In South Africa, at-home hospital care is a means through which to counter rapidly escalating medical inflation, bringing down the cost of care while maintaining patients’ access to high-quality care. Where we can bring down the cost of at-home hospital care, we can hopefully also make it available to ever more people. 

Our vision is that multiple Hospital at Home providers will emerge locally

We are hopeful that our step into Hospital at Home and the success of the programme to date serves as a disruptive catalyst to the broader private healthcare industry in South Africa to join the Hospital at Home movement. Our vision is to see multiple expert providers across our entire healthcare system delivering high quality hospital care at home. We are thrilled to be local pioneers in auspicious global company in this regard.

Huge thanks to Lara and to Dr Botho M. who lead our Hospital at Home venture, with our broader team. Lucky you Lara! You got to spend time at an amazing conference in the magnificent city of Barcelona! 

#hospitalathome #homecare #healthcare #WHAHC23