![]() Home testing has also become commonplace during the pandemic, and that’s another tool that can be used in digital home care. We now have smart population health data that can help us target people who would most benefit from tech-enabled care at home, and can intervene earlier. We are currently avoiding hospital admissions and helping people go home earlier, but to really scale, we need to recruit patients earlier than the point of admission. The next challenge is to move from a vibrant cottage industry of digital home care to our own industrial revolution. Imperial College, in London, achieved similar results for patients with heart failure. In Airedale, they’ve managed to halve the rate of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a progressive lung disease, who have to come into hospital as an emergency admission. This is important, because 70 percent of hospital beds are occupied by someone who is there due to their long-term condition. We now have tech-enabled virtual wards in every part of England, available on the National Health Service.Įven more ambitious is digital home care, which includes patients with an ongoing, long-term condition that needs constant monitoring. ![]() Virtual wards allow patients admitted to hospital to go home many days earlier and still get quality care in the comfort of their own home. These provide hospital-level care to patients at home using some simple technology-often an app or a sensor and a few medical devices-which allow medical staff to remotely monitor the patient’s clinical condition. Virtual wards are one way to improve the situation. The impact of the lack of redundancy is clear, particularly during winter: People end up with lengthy waits in the emergency departments, ambulances stack up outside hospitals, and patients with planned surgery see those operations canceled. The lowest rates across the whole of Europe are in Sweden and the UK: The UK has 2.5 beds per 1,000, and last year it had a bed occupancy rate above 93 percent. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average number of beds per capita is about 4.4 per 1,000, with a bed occupancy rate of 76 percent. Somehow, however, we’ve learned to live without redundancy in our hospital capacity such that, when highly predictable seasonal demand occurs, the situation becomes exceptionally problematic.
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