I have blogged frequently about the decreasing number of inpatient hospital admissions (see, for example: Talking to Patients Helps Reduce Hospital Readmissions; Inpatient Admissions Decreasing; Implications for Hospital-Based Labs). One of the factors contributing to this decline are new healthcare models such as "hospital at home" for the care of sicker patients in their homes (see: Are Hospitals Becoming Obsolete; Consequences for Pathology and the Labs; Reducing the Cost of Care; Provide Home Care for Sicker Patients with Remote Monitoring). The majority of the patients suitable for this care approach are CCC patients as described in a recent article (see COMPLEX, CHRONIC, CO-MORBID: THE CCC PATIENT). Below is an excerpt from it:
...31.5 percent of all Americans suffer from multiple, difficult to manage diseases — a patient population we define as complex, chronic, co-morbid, or CCC patients. Patients with complex, chronic, co-morbid conditions command disproportionate healthcare industry spending. In fact, the nearly one-third of the U.S. population that have multiple chronic conditions drive a staggering 71 percent of U.S. healthcare spending....Managing this population’s care and identifying which patients are at growing health risk, and when, is especially challenging....
We define CCC patients as:
Complex: Their health is influenced by socioeconomic, cultural, environmental, and behavioral factors, along with health-related factors.
Chronic: They require ongoing medical care and have long-lasting physical and mental health conditions, such as heart failure, diabetes, COPD, hypertension, and depression.
Co-morbid: They have multiple diseases, disorders, or conditions, and may develop more with age. Comorbidity adds complexity to caring for patients.
Medtronic Care Management Services (MCMS) can play an important role in addressing unmet needs of the CCC patient population. Our remote monitoring program is designed to give patients a more active role in their care management while helping to enable clinicians to gauge their patients’ health status outside the hospital setting. Through daily symptoms data and biometric readings, clinicians can track the patient’s multiple conditions over time, aggregate patient data, prioritize patients for further assessment, and potentially intervene before an acute event occurs.
So we now see a large healthcare technology company like Medtronic calculating that the hospital-at-home market is sufficiently large that it is willing to develop a monitoring system enabling care of CCC patients at home. This reminds me of virtual critical care (see, for example: Telemedicine Transforms Intensive Care Units in Smaller Hospitals with Remote Monitoring; Centralized Cardiac Monitoring Center Developed by Cleveland Clinic). This latter technology was deployed by health systems with some smaller hospitals with a small number of critical care beds. These patients could be monitored by intensivists based in their larger hospitals at some distance. The technology at that time was too expensive to justify installation in homes for individual patients. Fast forward to the point today when CCC patients can be monitored at home by hospital personnel.
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