South Shore Hospital Launches SNF-at-Home Program
South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, Mass., has turned to a Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) program to provide acute and post-acute care in the home as an alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar healthcare services.
During home visits, South Shore Health’s specially trained MIH paramedics provide clinical interventions including physical examination, IV medications and fluids. They also collect laboratory studies. In conjunction with South Shore Visiting Nurse Association (VNA), patients enrolled in the program may receive intensive physical and occupational therapy, as well as nursing services. Patients eligible for the program have a variety of diagnoses, including congestive heart failure, COPD, COVID-19 and pneumonia, among others.
“The SNF [skilled nursing facility]-at-Home program has been instrumental in helping us care for high-risk patients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Kelly Lannutti, D.O., MIH medical director and program development and clinical innovation physician at South Shore Hospital, in a statement. “As the pandemic accelerated our growth of home-based care, we found that having real-time access to continuous patient vital sign data was critical to ensuring the same level of care in the home as a patient would receive in the hospital or in a post-acute setting.”
South Shore is using Current Health’s remote healthcare platform to deliver round-the-clock patient management remotely.
Patients enrolled in the MIH program may be equipped with a Current Health kit, which includes a wearable device that continuously and passively captures patient vitals including respiration rate, oxygen saturation, mobility and step count, pulse rate, and body temperature; a tablet for communicating with members of the MIH provider team; and a HomeHub device, which provides internet connectivity for patients who do not already have it in their home.
Current Health CEO and co-founder Christopher McCann recently took part in a Healthcare Innovation panel discussion on remote patient monitoring and hospital-at-home efforts. He said that although technological advances and operational imperatives are pushing more and more care and care management into the home environment, there are structural impediments and challenges to creating an architecture of remote care delivery.
He said that it’s not the continuous monitoring or data integration between devices and systems that pose the biggest challenge; rather, it’s simple broadband issues. “In our populations, we find that between 25 and 50 percent [of people] don’t have home internet. And that’s not just in rural America; it’s in downtown Manhattan, Los Angeles and San Francisco.” These patients are also the ones who most need to be addressed—due to low socioeconomic status and old age—but can’t get equitable access, McCann added. “The problem is really hard to solve; we [have] provided plug-and-play cellular activity for patients in the home, but getting that right has taken significant investment, and we still don’t have it right. [More than half] of the support we deal with daily relates to home connectivity,” he reported.
