Here are eight things to know, according to a Becker’s interview with Susan Jarvis, COO of Sanford Health’s Fargo, N.D., market:
1. The health system admitted its first acute hospital care at home patient Nov. 5 in its Fargo market.
2. Sanford Health plans to start with an average daily census of five patients and expand to 12 to 16 in the near future.
3. The initiative will serve patients located within a 25- to 30-mile radius of Fargo, which Ms. Jarvis said gets pretty rural. What Sanford leaders learn from this program will inform future rural expansion; Ms. Jarvis predicts staffing will be the biggest barrier. Many hospital-at-home programs serve metropolitan areas (Sanford is the country’s largest rural health system).
4. The health system decided to start with the Fargo market after a group of hospitalists advocated for the program and because of heightened capacity issues there.
5. Sanford Health is admitting patients who come through the emergency department or who are nearing the end of their hospital stays, with conditions such as community-acquired pneumonia, nausea, vomiting, dehydration, urinary tract infection, and congestive heart failure exacerbation.
6. Registered nurses and community paramedics provide the twice-daily home visits. On the technology side, Sanford Health is working with smart device company TytoCare and using Epic’s MyChart Bedside mobile app.
7. CMS approved Sanford Health for acute hospital care at home in November 2023, but it took over a year to roll out the program because the health system had to boost staffing, figure out logistics like medication delivery, and wait for an Epic EHR upgrade.
8. “Programs like this are the future of healthcare,” Ms. Jarvis said. She remembers working at one of the first ASCs in the 1990s; now those are commonplace. She predicts hospital at home eventually will be as well. “One of the next evolutions in healthcare is: How do we provide these services in the home equal to what we’re providing in the hospital?” she said. “And I’m excited about that. This program is going to change the way we do business and healthcare.”