“The Doctor Will See You Now…In Your Home.”
After well over a century during which the majority of care delivery shifted from the home to hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes, we are increasingly witnessing a gradual reversal of this trend. Fueled by a combination of new technology, the rising cost of care in other settings, and personal preferences for the relative convenience and safety of the home, many would argue that this deinstitutionalization of care is long overdue.
Telehealth
While the adoption curve for telehealth has been less compelling than many health care futurists anticipated, a growing percentage of Americans—now at 8 percent—have tried telehealth at least once, and an even larger percentage has expressed openness to considering it in the future. And while millennials have tried telehealth at almost 3 times the rate of the general population, its potential impact on improving quality and reducing cost may be even greater for seniors, who leverage telehealth for different purposes, such as assistance with medication adherence.
Remote Monitoring
From digital glucometers, scales, pulse oximeters, and blood pressure cuffs to Alexa devices with health care focused “skills,” a range of technologies has made it possible to better manage a number of chronic conditions in the home, including diabetes, congestive heart failure, and hypertension. Efforts to titrate medications for diabetes and hypertension that previously took weeks can be achieved, at times, in days, because of the much greater volume and frequency of data that can be collected with digitally enabled devices combined with telehealth, enabling clinicians to titrate these medicines much more efficiently than the “start at this dose, and see me back in a week” approach.
Recently, United Health Care announced the acquisition of Vivify, a remote monitoring company that leases to providers tablets connected to Bluetooth enabled devices that allow them to monitor and intervene as patients’ health conditions evolve in the home. Given the massive number of care delivery assets that it has accumulated—from p