The Salt Lake City, Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare will be expanding its health services this year to further enable patients to receive clinical care at home.
The new service, called Intermountain at Home, is a program that will expand established Intermountain Homecare & Hospice services, with the core aim to prevent or shorten hospital admissions.
According to officials, home-based nursing services were introduced at Intermountain in 1982 to transition patients safely home after hospital discharges. Since then, Intermountain Homecare & Hospice has continued to grow and now supports patients with home-based post-hospital, palliative, and end-of-life care as well as medical equipment maintenance.
The new program will incorporate these services, while also adding other functions over the next several months. These include various health IT-related services, such as: remote monitoring, expanded telemedicine capabilities; virtual urgent care visits through Intermountain Connect Care, a 24/7 online service that allows patients to receive personalized care from Intermountain caregivers via their smartphones, tablets, and computers; and appointment-based video visits.
Last year, Intermountain launched one of the nation’s largest virtual hospital services, bringing together 35 telehealth programs and more than 500 caregivers to enable patients to receive remote medical care.
What’s more, the new model will this new model will include daily living support through Homespire, an Intermountain company that helps seniors and other people live healthy and independent lives at home. This support will focus on the social determinants of health that affect patients’ access to care and quality of life, officials noted.
“Providing these types of services in the home versus a traditional hospital setting has been proven to be effective in reducing complications, rehospitalizations, and trips to emergency departments while cutting the overall cost of care by 30 percent or more,” said Rebekah Couper-Noles, R.N., Intermountain Healthcare’s chief nursing officer of community-based care.
