Top 10 predictions for care at home in 2025

Care-at-home models and programs are garnering increased attention by provider organizations and technology vendors. As a result, this space will be one to watch closely in 2025. As clinical and business leaders consider its evolution, predictions are starting to emerge. 

During a January Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Best Buy Health, Sindhu Pandit, MD, senior medical director at Best Buy Health, moderated a discussion with Stephen Dorner, MD, MPH, M MSc, chief clinical and innovation officer for healthcare at home at Mass General Brigham (Boston), and Michael Capriotti, president of advanced care operations and logistics at Virtua Health (Marlton, N.J.). They discussed top 10 predictions for where care-at-home is headed in 2025. 

The panelists' top 10 predictions are:

  1. Collective understanding of the value of hospital-at-home will evolve. Key to this evolution will be a shared understanding that hospital-at-home programs are different from telehealth offerings. "Telehealth is a critical enabling tool for hospital-at-home, but it's very different in terms of the breadth of services that come through hospital-at-home delivery and all the associated outcome, cost and patient experience differentiators," Dr. Dorner said. 
  2. Hospital-at-home will continue to be a cornerstone of care at home. However, to succeed in a value-based care environment, organizations need to diversify their programs. "Anywhere from 10% to 25% of care will move into the home in the next 10 years and hospital-at-home is just one component of that," Mr. Capriotti said. "If you focus solely on hospital-at-home, it can hinder the conversation around what truly is the value of a care-at-home program."
  3. Organizations will shift away from direct reimbursement models toward cost-benefit analyses. This will be the way to demonstrate the economic value of care-at-home programs, but it will require organizations to consider the global value of how delivering care in the home frees up resources elsewhere in the system. Organizations must engage their financial teams in that conversation, Dr. Pandit said. 
  4. The maturity of care-at-home programs will hinge on embedding them into the culture. This includes encouraging clinicians to evaluate patients' suitability at the earliest opportunity and making such programs part of clinicians' vernacular by embedding conversations about them in multidisciplinary rounds.
  5. The lines between virtual care and care at home will blur. This is because the skill sets required of healthcare professionals to deliver care in either setting will eventually converge. Mr. Capriotti said that could be great for organizations dealing with clinician shortages and surges in demand for care due to the aging of the Boomer population, since the skill set would be transferrable.
  6. Helped by technology, fall management will shift from detection to prevention. Two specific approaches organizations may adopt more broadly are deploying ambient sensors that alert caregivers to fall risk factors and changing flooring materials to both reduce the likelihood of falls and lessen their impact when they do occur.
  7. Distinctions between consumer wearables and remote patient monitoring tech will fade. The key capability needed from a provider perspective will be creating an optimal ecosystem that accommodates all of those devices and allows them to inform and guide care delivery through the data points they collect. "It's really not about the device itself — it's about the information you're gathering from it," Dr. Pandit said.
  8. Care at home will see new entrants in both the hospital and the vendor space. While new players will flock to the care-at-home space, some provider organizations will seek partnerships that allow them to leverage a proven technology and not have to reinvent the wheel. Another differentiating point for technology vendors will be how effectively they turn data points into actionable information for providers, rather than just collect raw data. =
  9. AI is going to be layered on top of in-home data to make it more proactive and predictive. Examples of how AI can help include predicting health deterioration in a patient's health before it happens, predicting the level of care a new patient should be in (e.g., observation vs. admission) and assessing whether a patient is a good candidate for care at home.
  10. The human touch behind the technology will be more important than ever. This is because technology is an enabler, not a substitute for a human clinician or caregiver. "One of my surprise takeaways from [piloting such initiatives] is that a lot of times virtual care enables an uninterrupted interaction with a patient that would not have happened on a traditional med-surg floor," Mr. Capriotti concluded.

 

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