The health system and tech retailer are developing a care orchestration platform, set to go live in one of Mass General Brigham’s hospital-at-home regions in the spring then another in the summer before being made available to the public.
“A vendor, for example, will get information sent to them electronically in a way that otherwise would have previously required phone calls,” Stephen Dorner, MD, chief clinical and innovation officer of Mass General Brigham Healthcare at Home, told Becker’s during the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. “There’s one central platform that can do that across different vendors, instead of needing individual processes for each of the individual vendors.”
Hospital-at-home leaders have long cited the need for a care orchestration app that can coordinate the logistics — from technology to medical supplies to staffing — it takes to deliver inpatient-level treatment in the home.
Beyond orchestration, Dr. Dorner also envisions a role for AI in hospital at home. “You hear falls, and you think, OK, fall detection. But what about fall prevention instead?” he said.
He said AI-powered sensors in the home could learn a patient’s typical movements to determine when something may be out of whack. He said it would be similar to modern automobile technology that anticipates crashes.
Mass General Brigham, which has one of the largest hospital-at-home programs in the country, has an average daily census of 70 patients for the care model but has been treating more patients overall by getting better at it and discharging them faster. The health system has expanded to postoperative and oncology patients, with an ultimate goal of increasing the program tenfold to about 10% of hospital capacity.
“We firmly believe that more care should be delivered in patients’ homes,” Dr. Dorner said. “It’s really a question of what encounter type, what the finances of those encounter structures look like, and making sure we’re right-sizing our approach.”
