University Hospitals Introduces UH Hospital@Home

CLEVELAND, Ohio – UH Hospital@Home brings the hospital to the patient, encompassing a broad range of medical services and disciplines, including social work, nutrition, nursing, occupational / physical / speech therapists, pharmacists, home health aides, paramedics and providers. This team is led by nurses who orchestrate everything: Daily in-person visits with a paramedic from UH’s EMS Institute, daily visits (either in-home or virtual) visits by a provider, daily visits (either in-home or virtual) visits by a registered nurse and 24x7 access to the UH Hospital@Home Care team. The teams deliver meals, medication (including oxygen, prescription medication and infusions), laboratory, radiology, and other services as needed. Family members who live outside the state can even be included in the patient's virtual visits.

“Having that firsthand knowledge of patient needs and understanding their environment is critical to keeping them safe and helping them get better. Bringing the full power of UH care to patients in their own home, care is safer for them and promotes a healing environment because they are comfortable in their own home and do not worry about what will happen to their care when they leave the hospital. We are with them every step of the way." says Melissa Cole, University Hospitals VP of Integrated Delivery Operations.

Cole says experiences from the pandemic helped pave the way for this innovative first of its kind program, “During the early days of the pandemic, we introduced UHRemote, a remote patient monitoring system that allows us to keep tabs on COVID-19 patients' heartrate and blood oxygenation levels. A team of nurses, each with multiple screens, watched dashboards of patient data and received alerts from wearable devices if a patient's numbers were too high or too low. We learned much from the over 2,200 patients we cared for over the past year, and often heard how grateful they were to not be isolated from family alone in the hospital. We combined the experiences from UHRemote with the decades of experience of our Home Health teams, added in a few more services, and UH Hospital@Home was born.”

Currently, the comprehensive care program is for patients who have a need for an inpatient stay and have a diagnosis of COVID-19, COPD, community-acquired pneumonia and/or cellulitis. In the future, the program could expand for patients with other medical and even some surgical diagnoses. This program is approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and has been submitted to other insurance providers for consideration.