Hospitals are expensive to build and maintain. They need complex equipment and a sophisticated infrastructure to store data, communicate between teams and protect patient information.
Pre-pandemic, Mayo Clinic’s CEO asked the question: Can 15% to 25% of patients in the hospital be safely cared for at home? The health system partnered with Kaiser Permanente to develop a hospital at home model now deployed by 21 health systems across the country, including academic institutions and regional hospitals.
“We learned over the course of five years and through the pandemic that that model is actually better,” Maneesh Goyal, COO of Mayo Clinic Platform, told Becker’s during a recent interview. “Patients prefer it. The outcomes are better because we know what’s actually happening with the patient after they leave our premise.”
Mayo Clinic has seen thousands of patients under the model and now different departments are considering how they can offer new services at home, “rethinking the very notion of the hospital.” One great example came from the oncology department.
“Could we deliver chemotherapeutics in the home? That’s done in a clinical setting because that is the standard process. There’s no reason a patient needs to go for most chemo to a clinical setting,” said Mr. Goyal. “So we said, let’s leverage this infrastructure and deliver chemotherapetics in the home environment, and we ran a clinical trial. We found patients loved it and satisfaction was higher. The clinical results were safe and effective.”
Mayo decided to expand the model and offered hospitals within the network a chance to participate in the clinical trial. The trial is ongoing at Altru in Grand Forks, N.D. Mayo Clinic was able to stand up the program and power their patients to receive the same model of care as patients at the Mayo Clinic. It took considerable effort and resources, but will have implications for cancer care delivery moving forward.
“We’re running a distributed clinical trial and recruiting patients from an academic institution and a community hospital,” said Mr. Goyal. “We’re running a new model of care, and we’re doing this in months time, versus talking about it for years. We stood that up in three or four months timeframe. That’s really power. And that’s one narrow example among many, many others.”
