Connectivity access across their community
The Worcester community faces stark broadband inequities, with around 1/3 of low-income households lacking in-home high-speed internet.
UMass Memorial Health Case Study
Case Study
UMass Memorial Health saves 3,000+ bed days and lowers readmissions.
How UMass Memorial Health built a leading Hospital at Home program, delivering excellent patient experiences and improving clinical outcomes for complex patients.
At a glance: UMass Memorial
UMass Memorial Health, a safety-net, academic provider based in Worcester, Massachusetts. With the fewest hospital beds per capita of any health system in the state, UMass Memorial has made expanding capacity a top priority.
UMass Memorial Health began planning its Hospital at Home program in March 2021 and enrolled its first patient only six months later.
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Extend acute care capacity
For UMass Memorial, the Hospital at Home program serves the strategic function of meeting the rising demand for care with the organization’s existing bricks-and-mortar footprint.
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Promote health equity
Serving a diverse community with a high number of dual-eligible patients, the team at UMass was focused on building a program that could safely care for everyone, including patients facing complex SDoH, multiple co-morbidities, and language and access barriers.
Challenges
The team at UMass needed to address various SDoH and access challenges within their community, including:
Technical literacy among some patient populations
The team also faces low technical literacy among older, low-income patients, creating a high bar for technology to be accessible and user-friendly.
Diverse language needs for product interactions
More than 23% of the Worcester community has a primary language other than English.
Solution
A technology-enabled Hospital at Home program that prioritizes patient equity.
Clinical-grade monitoring to keep a close eye on patients at home
The solution included Current Health’s continuous monitoring device as well as intermittent devices configured to each patient’s diagnosis. Intelligent alarms indicate deterioration according to each patient’s risks.
Clinical team support for monitoring data, triaging alarms, and proactively engaging patients.
The Current Health Clinical Command Center provides the first level of support and responds to patient trends and alarms. This support enabled significant program growth, doubling daily admissions.
Patient engagement tools to keep patients and care teams connected
Patients have access to on-demand video calls with their care team, and a translator if required. The intuitive patient interface can be customized to the patients’ primary language and daily task reminders and symptom surveys allow for detailed context around each patient’s experience.
Workflow integrations and in-home connectivity hubs
An in-depth integration with Epic prevents duplicate work and simplifies the referral and enrollment process for providers. The Current Health Home Hubs allow for inclusion of patients who may not have high-speed internet at home.
How UMass Grew One of the Largest Programs in the Country
From 1 to 16 patients per day
To make a meaningful impact on the inpatient capacity challenges UMass faces, the Hospital at Home team needed to scale their daily patient census quickly.
To do so, the UMass team frequently evaluated their eligibility criteria, focused on growing their risk tolerance, and added the Current Health Clinical Command Center to their operating model.
This additional support for monitoring, triage, and patient engagement enabled the program to grow the daily census by 160% in four months.
We’re able to get the whole picture of how patients are living and the complex factors affecting their health.
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“Current Health was a perfect partner for us. The technology allows us to go back to what is great about medicine. Taking care of patients in their home environment, but using technology”
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