Establish physician and
clinical team alignment
1
Level up your logistics
2
Drive effective change management and
program education
3
Align economic
incentives with payors
4
Focus on delivering care
for high acuity populations
5
Keep patient acceptance workflows simple
6
Internally, organizations need structured
change management programs designed to educate internal staff and leaders on the “why” behind acute care at home programs and build commitment to new service offerings. Include key stakeholders in program and process development and continue to tie back to
the values of the organization and its clinicians and staff.
Externally for consumers, marketing communications and patient education
will be ongoing with outreach segmented
and targeted to key populations.
Hospital at home programs require a distinct constellation of services, vendors, and suppliers. Start early recruiting, educating, and negotiating with your vendors, and service provider networks. Clear service-level agreements and
an understanding of the program will help to streamline the complex logistics and supply chain elements of caring for acute-level patients in their homes.
Clinical team alignment is critical to ensuring a robust program is established, endorsed, and promoted throughout the organization and community at large.
Clinician support is best achieved through establishing champions in the organization that begins their involvement in the design and implementation phases. Executive teams also need to understand how hospital at home connects to and supports multiple strategic objectives of the organization.
Organizations can alleviate hesitancy from payors by starting early with payor conversations about program design and expectations.
Keep your strategy top of mind in standing conversations and continue to educate that the full scope of hospital services can be offered successfully in the home and that the program
is sustainable through a regular review of performance metrics.
Establish your program with a stable medical/surgical patient population in mind. The inclusion of higher acuity patients and ensuring the timely execution of necessary services into the home will help ensure a scalable platform to accept lower acuity populations in the future.
Make the identification of potential patients as simple as possible with integration into existing workflows. Build standardized processes, scripting for staff, and small modifications to
the electronic health record (EHR) to flag eligible patients. This approach to patient inclusion should function as seamlessly as a traditional hospital admission to an inpatient unit.
