hospital – Designing for Aged Care

The home hospital model of care reduces costs and improves quality of care

Posted on February 19, 2020February 27, 2020 by Joanna Sun

News Release
December 2019| Brigham and Women’s Hospital: Home Hospital Reduces Costs, Improves Care

First randomized controlled trial of home hospital model in the U.S. reports improvements in outcomes meaningful to health systems and patients – sets stage for transformation of acute care delivery

Boston, MA — The home hospital model of care — in which select patients receive hospital-level care for an acute illness from the comfort of their own home instead of in a traditional hospital — has become increasingly popular across the United States. A pilot study conducted by investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital indicated that the home hospital model has the potential to lower costs and improve care. Now, the results of the investigators’ randomized controlled trial with more patients strengthens the evidence, showing that home hospital care reduced cost, utilization, and readmissions while increasing physical activity compared with usual hospital care. Results are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

“This work cements the idea that, for the right patients, we can deliver hospital-level care outside of the four walls of the traditional hospital and provides more of the data we need to make home hospital care the standard of care in our country,” said corresponding author David Levine, MD, MPH, MA, a physician and researcher in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care. “It opens up so many exciting possibilities — it’s exciting for patients because it gives them the opportunity to be in a familiar setting, and it’s exciting for clinicians because we get to be with a patient in that person’s own surroundings. As a community-minded hospital, this is a way for us to bring excellent care to our community.”

Levine and colleagues enrolled 91 adults into their trial. Each patient had been admitted via the emergency department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital or Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital with a select acute condition — including infection, heart failure exacerbation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbation and asthma exacerbation — and lived within five miles of the hospital. Patients were randomized to either stay at the hospital and receive standard care or receive care at home, which included nurse and physician home visits, intravenous medications, remote monitoring, video communication and point-of-care testing.

The team measured the total direct cost of care, including costs for nonphysician labor, supplies, medications and diagnostic tests. They found that for patients who received care at home, total costs were 38 percent lower than for control patients. Home hospital patients had fewer lab orders, used less imaging and had fewer consultations. The team also found that home hospital patients spent a smaller portion of their day sedentary or lying down and had lower readmission rates within 30 days than control patients. Because of the strength of its positive findings, the study was stopped early.

Levine notes that payment remains a challenge for the home hospital model, in part because most insurance companies do not yet recognize the home as a place where hospital-level care happens, although Brigham is making headway with insurers. With the conclusion of the trial, the Brigham is now increasing home hospital capacity to make it clinically available to more patients.

Levine and his colleagues are continuing to test and improve the home hospital model.

“We know there’s always more work to be done, and so we pride ourselves on being a continuous learning and innovation shop,” he said. “We’re now launching trials that include remote patient care, we’re adding artificial intelligence to home hospital care and we’re even exploring ways to bring home hospital care to rural settings. We’ll continue to refine and spread this model so that even more patients can get home hospital care.”

This work is supported by the Partners HealthCare Center for Population Health and internal departmental funds. Levine reports grants from Biofourmis outside the submitted work. A co-author reports consulting income from Verily, GreyBird Ventures, and Atlas5D outside the submitted work. A co-author reports grants from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and Portola Pharmaceuticals outside the submitted work. Disclosures can also be viewed here.

Caregiving, International Policies, Research & Best Practice, The Built Environment

Why hospital architects need to talk to nurses

Posted on August 14, 2018November 1, 2019 by Joanna Sun

Hospital building work in East Sussex.
Shutterstock

Jens Roehrich, University of Bath

Many of us pay close attention to how our taxes are spent, and how well governments invest in infrastructure projects such as roads, schools and hospitals. Value for money is key. Yet horror stories of waste, lateness and poor quality are common.

To develop and finance public services and infrastructure, governments around the world (but especially in Europe) have become increasingly keen on private sector involvement. These cross-sector collaborations can help provide value for money for taxpayers – but they are also at risk of wasting it.

In health care, collaborations between public and private partners have a direct impact on society. This is why it is important for health care professionals like doctors and nurses to talk directly to the designers and builders of a new hospital. It ensures that these projects not only deliver economic value for the private companies building the hospital – but also social value for the doctors, nurses and patients who will use the hospital for decades to come.

For instance, in one recently built British hospital, medical staff were able to bring valuable insight to the design process. A visit by some of the hospital’s senior nurses to a children’s hospital in the US led to the replication of a lighting design on the ceiling of a children’s ward so that it mimicked a starry night sky. As one of the nurses explained to me afterwards:

It might sound like a small change, but it provides a much more homely surrounding than the normal NHS lighting. This is important for our young patients [providing a] less scary, hospital experience which positively impacts on the healing process. […] It creates a much nicer environment in which our little patients can recover.

In another hospital, input from senior nurses helped to establish a ward design that most suited their professional needs – right down to the placement of plumbing. This saved large amounts of money that might have been spent on undoing unnecessary building work had the nurses not been consulted.

As one project manager of the construction company told me: “Thanks to [the senior nurses’] input and telling us how they intend to use wards, we changed the ward layout, such as the position of sinks. This may seem to be a minor issue, but may have a huge impact when caring for a patient.”

To see how social value can be best achieved through cross-sector collaborations we looked into the key building blocks that go beyond a mere focus on contracts.

An organisations’ prior experience of cross sector collaboration and a supportive climate is vital in creating social value. It also helps to have had some exposure to previous projects (good and bad). But a major ingredient is the individual employees in both public and private sector organisations.

We need a starry sky ceiling right there.
Shutterstock

Building mutual knowledge and aligning goals between doctors, nurses and design and construction professionals is key, as public and private sector employees often have different objectives for projects (making a profit vs healing patients). A shared understanding can come through listening to and appreciating the other parties’ professional language and the expertise that language expresses.

Joint expertise

Beyond an understanding of the other parties’ expertise, practical matters of shared goals and jointly developed timelines are necessary. Coordinating efforts between the two sectors needs to take priority at the outset – rather than emphasising project speed and completion.

To encourage these positive outcomes, the key people need to meet frequently to exchange information, address problems and discuss plans. Without this kind of coordination and collaboration, it will be impossible to make the most of both sides’ specialist knowledge.

So when it comes to hospitals and clinics, the private company needs to actively seek the involvement of doctors and nurses in the design and construction phases. Similarly, doctors and nurses should not be threatened by private companies, but instead seek to become actively engaged. This will help drive creative design innovations such as the “night sky” ceiling in the children’s ward.

It takes time and resources, but this kind of collaboration and coordination between public and private sectors provides an opportunity to increase value – both economic and social. And that’s something that not only benefits construction companies and health care professionals – but patients and taxpayers, too.

Jens Roehrich, Professor of Supply Chain Innovation, University of Bath

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Caregiving, International Campaigns, International Policies

“Pop Drop” Study finds more ER visits & higher costs for older disabled patients with stressed caregivers

Posted on February 26, 2018February 26, 2018 by Joanna Sun

News release

AUGUST 24, 2017 | MICHIGAN – “Pop Drop” Study finds more ER visits & higher costs for older disabled patients with stressed caregivers

Fatigue, sadness and poor health among the spouses who take care of disabled elders can mean higher Medicare bills for the patients.

Emergency room staff call it a “pop drop” – when a disabled older person comes in for medical attention, but it seems like the person who takes care of them at home is also seeking a break from the demands of caregiving.

It’s been hard to actually study the phenomenon. A new University of Michigan study suggests that tired family caregivers are associated with greater ER visits and higher overall health care costs for the person they care for.

In a paper in the new issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, the team reports their findings from a study of 3,101 couples over the age of 65, each with one spouse acting as caregiver for their disabled partner.

The researchers looked at the Medicare payments and emergency department visits for the disabled spouses in the six months after the caregiver spouses took standard tests to measure their fatigue, mood, sleep habits, health and happiness.

Even after they took into account many factors, the researchers found that in just those six months, emergency department visits were 23 percent higher among patients whose caregivers had scored high for fatigue or low on their own health status.

Patients with fatigued or sad caregivers also had higher Medicare costs in that same time period: $1,900 more if the caregiver scored high for fatigue, and $1,300 more if the caregiver scored high for sadness, even after all other factors were taken into account.

The cost of unpaid help

“Many of us who work in clinical settings feel that patients with high home caregiving needs, such as dementia, often rely on the medical system as a source of respite for their spouses or other caregivers, because other respite isn’t paid for,” says lead author Claire Ankuda, M.D., M.P.H. “But there hasn’t been a lot of data about it, and only recently has our society been talking about caregivers and potential ways to incentivize and support them as a way of keeping patients living at home.”

“Informal caregivers, including spouses, enable older adults with functional disability to stay out of the nursing home and live at home where they’d prefer to be,” says senior author Deborah Levine, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of internal medicine and neurology at U-M. “Our findings suggest that we need to do a better job of identifying and supporting caregivers experiencing distress, in order to help caregivers feel better and hopefully improve outcomes in older adults with disability.”

Long-term data gives key insights

The couples in the study were all taking part in the long-term Health and Retirement Study, conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research on behalf of the National Institutes of Health. Ankuda, Levine and their colleagues probed HRS data because it allowed them to correct for factors that other, short-term studies can’t – such as the baseline level of Medicare costs, demographic differences including income and education, and even whether the couples have adult children living nearby.

The findings add hard new data about the link between caregivers’ own experiences and the amount the Medicare system pays to take care of those the caregivers take care of at home.

Nearly 15 million older adults get help with everyday activities from spouses and other family or friend caregivers. In the new study, the researchers included couples where one spouse got help from the other with activities such as bathing, dressing, walking, getting into or out of bed, shopping, cooking, and taking medications.

Helping with these tasks on a daily basis, without pay or respite, can take a toll on the caregiver’s own health, wellness and mental state – which can lead to burnout. Medicare does not offer payment or formal respite coverage for family or friends who take regular care of older adults – and only covers home care by certified agencies under certain circumstances.

More research & services needed

Ankuda notes that studies on the impact of supporting family caregivers more formally are just beginning to produce results.

Meanwhile, health policy researchers are beginning to suggest that it may make fiscal sense to incentivize home caregiving, to keep seniors from needing more expensive nursing home care.

“I definitely think there are specific services that could help caregivers, if we can identify those people who are highest risk and provide a basic level of support such as an around-the-clock geriatric care call line that could help caregivers feel less isolated and talk to a nurse about whether, for example, to go to the emergency department,” Ankuda says. “This is a high-cost, vulnerable population.”

Formal respite care, peer support groups and other options could also help stave off fatigue and sadness – and the hospital staff who notice “pop drop” practices could help steer caregivers to such options. So could the primary care clinicians who take care of both the disabled spouse and the caregiver.

Because the new study takes into account the level of Medicare spending for the disabled spouse in the six months before their caregiver was interviewed, it may actually underestimate the impact of caregiver fatigue, she notes.

Indeed, before the authors corrected for the full range of factors, they documented that Medicare costs were lower for patients whose spouse-caregivers who reported being happy or rested. They also saw higher costs among patients whose caregivers had higher depression scores on a standard mood questionnaire.

One factor that wasn’t associated with higher costs in the new study was the caregiver’s score on a standard measure of sleep habits. Sleep disruption is harder to quantify in older people, Ankuda notes. But the measurement of fatigue, which can result from both the strain of caregiving and poor sleep, was clearly associated with both higher rates of emergency department visits and higher overall costs.

Featured IHPI Members

Claire

Ankuda

M.D., M.P.H.

Deborah

Levine

M.D., M.P.H.