Intermountain Health recently reached a major milestone with its hospital-at-home program. The health system has officially treated 1,000 patients at home since the launch of the program in 2020.
Dr. Nathan Starr — the medical director of home services for Intermountain — considers the milestone especially significant with the context of the pandemic.
“We have room for growth, and a need and desire to grow, to support the goals of our program,” he told Home Health Care News. “What is exciting about this is not just hitting this milestone of 1,000 patients, it’s doing so coming out of COVID. We worked really hard over the last two years, as we’ve come out of the pandemic, to transition to what we view as a sustainable long-term program.”
Intermountain is a nonprofit system with 33 hospitals and 385 clinics. The health system has locations in seven states. It also has a number of care-at-home programs under its roof, including home health care, primary care, hospital at home and more.
Intermountain’s hospital-at-home program is available for eligible patients who live near 16 Intermountain hospitals in Utah. Patient care is provided through a partnership with Castell, Intermountain’s population health entity.
“We are working together to convene all the necessary parts of the Intermountain organization to deliver the care in the home,” Starr said. “We’re pulling resources from our individual hospitals, our home care, our home DME, our pharmacy, as well as our tele-hospital program. That’s one of the big roles of Castell — taking all these separate parts of the organization and bringing them together in a holistic manner that offers great care.”
The program includes technology to monitor vital signs remotely, daily in-home nurse visits, daily telehealth, access to 24-hour on-call nurses and physicians and more.
Starr noted that Intermountain’s hospital-level care at home program is on pace to see a little over 20% growth in its volume next year.
While Intermountain hoped to see higher growth, Starr believes this progress is also significant because it allows clinicians across their system to see how successful this care delivery model can be.
“They see that this has worked and been safe for a large number of patients, we continue to have really excellent safety outcomes and really excellent quality outcomes over a good number of patients, which is driving just a ton of excitement,” he said.
Since the launch of the program, it has saved Intermountain more than 3,000 bed days.
“Every patient that we take care of at home has allowed another patient to get in and be cared for at the level they need,” Starr said. “That’s one of the most exciting things for me. [The program] doesn’t just benefit the patient that we take home, but it also benefits the patients that are then able to come into our system and get the care they need.”
The program has also cost patients up to 30% less compared to a traditional hospital stay.
Additionally, the program checked in at zero serious in-home safety events, and zero in-home deaths. The program’s readmission rate is roughly 7%.
Looking ahead, Intermountain plans to extend its hospital-at-home services to traditional Medicare and Medicaid patients in Utah next year.
Ultimately, the health system wants to expand the program to other states with Intermountain hospitals.
“We just view this as an essential part of where health care is going,” Starr said.
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