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Why the “Hospital at Home” May Be How You Get Care In the Near Future

F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE
4 min readDec 18, 2019

A new randomized trial finds that providing hospital-level care at home is more effective, and cheaper than traditional in-hospital care.

Whenever I’m rounding in the hospital, I come across a patient that just feels stuck there. Not because they are too sick, but because some seemingly trivial thing is keeping them in the hospital. They need an intravenous antibiotic, or they are waiting on a stress test, or the INR isn’t therapeutic yet. It seems like they would do fine at home if there were some way to send a doctor, a nurse, and a lab tech to the house every day.

But then I think, well, we couldn’t possibly afford to offer hospital-level care at home. It’s a pipe dream.

And then I saw this study, appearing in the Annals of Internal Medicine, that suggests that, for certain patients, hospital-at-home is not only feasible, it’s way cheaper than the traditional inpatient ward.

The study was out of Brigham and Women’s hospital. Over a seven-month period, 91 patients seen in the ED who were admitted to the medical service were randomized to usual care — in the hospital — or home hospital care. You all know what in-hospital care looks like.

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F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE
F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE

Written by F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE

Medicine, science, statistics. Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Yale. Host of "Impact Factor" on Medscape.com.

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