Discovery Hospital at Home: Bringing high-quality hospital-level care into patients' homes

There’s nothing like witnessing something first-hand, to truly appreciate its simplicity and value. A few days ago, we invited healthcare professionals to our headquarters at 1 Discovery Place, to hear from world-leading experts on hospital care at home. They also witnessed a role-played live simulation of Discovery Health’s Hospital at Home (H@H) programme.

Discovery H@H was launched at the start of this year following significant collaboration with leading global partners - with whom we continue to collaborate closely as we learn, grow, define and redefine best-practice in the burgeoning at-home hospital care arena.

At our event, Dr Botho Mhozya, our Head of H@H, demonstrated just how safely and meticulously hospital-level care can be delivered in the comfort of an eligible patient’s home. Through an immersive, on-stage, live demo, Botho showed the thoroughness of the doctor-patient care on offer. Enjoy the video I’ve shared of Dr Mhozya’s presentation at the event.

Very briefly, the Discovery Hospital at Home programme - one of the first offerings of this sort available in South Africa - provides care in the patient’s own home (where the treating physician is comfortable with care at home) for a range of medical and post-surgical conditions that would otherwise require hospital admission.

Globally, hospital-at-home programmes have existed for over 20 years. However, the need for alternative care settings over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic massively accelerated the uptake and proliferation of these programmes, and further ignited our own interest on this front. Prior to and during COVID-19 we offered Home Care and remote COVID-19 monitoring and care and gained significant experience and learning on what works in our market, in the process.

Today, the world’s leading medical facilities – from the Mayo Clinic to the Cleveland Clinic, Israel’s Sheba Medical Centre to Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard’s world-renowned teaching hospital in Boston), and many more - are running hospital-at-home care with exceptional outcomes. These are studied through randomised controlled trials and other published research. The programmes are consistently demonstrating high safety with superior outcomes at lower cost.

 Hospital at Home is the product of merging traditional multi-disciplinary hospitalisation with cutting edge, remote-monitoring medical technology.  Through artificial intelligence in the monitoring systems, a predictive view of a patient’s disease trajectory and early detection of arising issues empower the clinical team to intervene early, and accurately track patient status and progress.

 We hosted several thought leaders at our event. One of them was Dr David Levine  – General Internist, Clinician-Investigator and Medical Director at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. David is one of the globally leading researchers and experts on hospital care at home, and has been a great support to our programme. “High-tech with a human touch” is how the Brigham Health Home Hospital – running since 2016 - has been described.

Dr Levine has been a close partner to Discovery Health in the development of Hospital at Home, and he’s also driven many of the major studies that exist around this care model. He shared key insights into how hospital-level care in a patient’s home lowers cost, utilisation, and readmission rates. This care also improves the patient experience and promotes healing through everything from patients experiencing better sleep and more physical activity, closeness to loved ones, avoidance of hospital acquired infections and receiving more personalised care.

Dr Unben Pillay, GP and Africa Telehealth Collaboration Co-chair, also a speaker at the event, shared his experience of treating his first patient (and many more since) remotely over the course of the pandemic, making the very relevant point that across the board virtual care is fast-becoming becoming a norm.

-  Accenture’s 2020 Digital Health Consumer Survey found that patients embraced virtual care during the pandemic, with the majority finding virtual care as good, or better, than in-person care (and younger patients preferring it overall). Around 60% of these patients were keen to use virtual care and related technology in future.

-   At Discovery, we’ve seen a similar increase in the uptake of digital healthcare options, with an exponential increase – by 763% - in the use of telemedicine through Discovery Connected Care since 2019.”

So far, almost 150 patients ‘admitted’ by their physicians to Discovery’s Hospital at Home programme have been able to avoid admission or be granted early discharge, with excellent outcomes across the board. We estimate that up to 8% of our member base’s hospital admissions can be dealt with in this way, with cost savings of up to 20% per case in comparison to a traditional hospital admission.

It is our hope that we will see more businesses invest in this form of care and expand at-home hospital offerings in our country.

 Read our press release, related to the event for more information: https://discv.co/3zoJ6mN