Mass General Brigham partners with Best Buy on tech for acute care at home
Studies show the acute care at home model lowers mortality rates, reduces hospital readmissions and decreases lengths of stay.
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Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham are collaborating on the health system's acute hospital care at home program called Mass General Brigham's Home Hospital.
This technology-enabled clinical delivery model will expand access to Massachusetts residents choosing to receive acute-level hospital care at home.
Best Buy, which has a retail footprint of nearly 1,000 stores, also offers digital retail through BestBuy.com and the Best Buy App. It also offers Lively Mobile Plus, an emergency-response-system device that can detect falls and enable patients to contact an Urgent Response Agent.
Other technologies being leveraged by Mass General Brigham are: Current Health, Best Buy's care at home platform, which connects patients to nurses, paramedics, advanced practitioners and physicians; and services that enable better coordination of the ways home-based care is delivered and logistics management to support the patient's broad care team.
Mass General Brigham also operates a Medicare certified home health business, offering skilled and supportive services for patients who are homebound during the course of an illness or injury. Together, Home Hospital and Home Care are components of Mass General Brigham's overall Healthcare at Home portfolio, which will now be supported by Best Buy Health.
Mass General Brigham's Home Hospital model includes nurses, paramedics, advanced practice providers, physicians and other clinicians who provide acute home-based care for patients who would otherwise need to be hospitalized for conditions such as heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), infections and more.
WHY THIS MATTERS
The collaboration will help address the challenge of workforce shortages. The Home Hospital experience has shown an increase in employee satisfaction through hybrid practice options and a reduction of clinician burnout, Best Buy said.
Also, an increasingly older population in the United States means individuals will need more care at a time of clinician shortages.
Studies show the acute care-at-home model lowers mortality rates, reduces hospital readmissions and decreases lengths of stay. Most patients prefer to stay in their homes.
As part of this relationship, Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham will create academic opportunities for individuals interested in pursuing nursing, paramedic and digital technology careers by offering scholarships to students choosing the at-home setting of care as their desired professional environment.
THE LARGER TREND
Hospital at Home, a trademarked name of Johns Hopkins Medicine, has been in practice in that health system's hospitals since at least 2002. The concept is not new, but hospital-level services at home became a necessity for all health systems when acute-care beds filled during the first surge of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospitals found the model worked, both for them and for patients. Health systems in value-based care contracts saved money on avoiding hospitalization and readmissions when the contracts had such extensions as a 30-day episode of care in Medicare Advantage agreements, according to Sg2, a consulting and analytics firm and Vizient subsidiary.
UMass Memorial Medical Center started the program during COVID-19. It found it to be so successful for the academic medical center and patients that in 2021 president Dr. Michael Gustafson talked about going all in for the hospital-care-at-home program.
ON THE RECORD
"At Mass General Brigham, we are building the integrated healthcare system of the future across the entire continuum of patient care needs," said Heather O'Sullivan, president of Healthcare at Home at Mass General Brigham. "As a recognized leader of Home Hospital services, we understand that consumers are increasingly choosing the comfort of care at home as an alternative to traditional, facility-based delivery settings. By enabling our world-class provider services with technology that matters, we are elevating system capabilities and, most importantly, improving clinical outcomes for the communities we serve today while preparing for the future delivery of care more broadly."
Twitter: @SusanJMorse
Email the writer: SMorse@himss.org
