Standardizing hospital-to-home programs for these cardiac conditions makes care pathways more efficient – reducing care costs and clinician workloads – while improving care quality and health outcomes. For example, a patient who has experienced a stroke could be sent home with a connected monitoring device to recover outside of the hospital in an environment where they are most comfortable. However, if an arrhythmia is detected, an urgent notification is sent to the patients’ care teams at the hospital so they can quickly make a diagnosis and bring the patient in for treatment, before their condition becomes critical.

The ambulatory monitoring data and technology enabling successful cardiology hospital-to-home programs today have laid the foundation for these learnings to be applied to new patient groups. As this model expands into new patient cohorts, for example, the early discharge of patient from the Emergency Department who might typically stay for hours for a simple evaluation of an arrythmia, we have an opportunity to unlock the same improvements to clinical workflow and health outcomes, as well as reduced costs, on a much broader scale – critical benefits for health systems working to manage the growing demand for acute care.


The next frontier: Leveraging health system data to unlock hospital at home
Ambulatory monitoring is changing cardiac care for the better, but as healthcare looks to transition more care programs outside of the hospital, health systems must leverage their data more strategically, with analytics playing a key role in driving new care pathways. In a hospital-at-home model, once a patient is ready to be discharged, they will be transferred to an “at home unit” where specialized nurses will directly oversee their remote care, giving patients a much more personalized and efficient experience. Many hospitals today do not realize that the data they already collect holds insights that could change the way they care for patients for the better. With the combination of advanced monitoring technology and analytics, data can help providers confidently determine which patients could be sent home earlier, and how to safely proceed with their care plan outside of the hospital.

To build the technological infrastructure to support hospital-at-home, it is essential for health systems to structure their data around the patient. While a hospital admin-centric database may be tempting, this data only improves operational efficiency but is not high-quality enough to truly enhance outcomes for patients as care expands outside of the hospital walls. Organizing data with the patient at the center means devices and systems are set up to bring together all the insights on a patient’s health into a centralized location, making it much easier to track their condition whether they are in the hospital, at home, or out in their community.

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