For instance, UChicago Medicine has had trouble recruiting nurses willing to go into patients’ homes in the urban neighborhoods it serves over safety concerns, according to chief medical information officer Cheng-Kai Kao, MD. And unlike some other states, Illinois doesn’t allow paramedics to provide acute hospital care at home.
Some hospital-at-home vendors also aren’t integrated with Epic, which UChicago Medicine uses for its EHR, Dr. Kao said.
“The biggest challenge with ‘hospital at home‘ is not usually a medical part because we know how to treat infections, we know how to treat hospital patients,” Dr. Kao said. “It’s often logistics that really is dragging us down. Because you need to figure out how to coordinate equipment, how to coordinate staff. And currently there’s not a good tool to run points on all these. That is still a big deficiency in the field.”
UChicago Medicine’s hospital-at-home program remains small but could scale rapidly with an influx of nurses, Dr. Kao said.
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