How Hippo Virtual Care™ is Transforming Post-Acute Care
A new partnership with Carpenter Health Network is bringing immediate benefits to providers and patients.
The Carpenter Health Network provides post-acute care services including home health, palliative, hospice, and rehabilitative services throughout Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Arkansas. The network also owns and manages Homedica HouseCalls, a virtual physician’s office that specializes in house calls.
Carpenter recognizes that patients’ needs are unique and changing, and is dedicated to providing them with a seamless, compassionate, and convenient transition of care when and where they need it during any phase of illness or injury.
The network provides the expert treatment from physicians and nurse practitioners delivered where patients are most at ease — in the comfort and safety of their own homes. This often includes primary care visits for patients who are unable to travel comfortably.
Not only does the continuum of care better meet the needs of both patients and their families, but it also helps reduce hospital admissions and emergency room visits.
As part of this commitment to effective and efficient care, Carpenter recently deployed the Hippo Virtual Care™ platform, which allows the network’s medical directors to work with remote and onsite nurse practitioners in their long-term acute care hospitals (LTACs), rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. The partnership will expand to include wound care and hospice care later in 2024.
Hippo’s hands-free, voice-activated, wearable computing platform delivers a “through the eyes of the clinician” viewpoint, allowing remote specialty physicians to collaborate in real-time with colleagues on the ground with the patient to support medical teaching, rounding, proctoring, and specialty consultations.
Healthcare professionals who’ve used Hippo Virtual Care™ within the Carpenter Health Network have eagerly adopted the platform, praising everything from its ease of use and financial benefits to its usefulness in improving speed and quality of care.
Staff Satisfaction
Care providers at Carpenter are unanimous in touting the easy, plug-and-play nature of the platform. They are particularly impressed at the immediate benefits it can provide after just a brief, 20-minute introduction and training session.
“This tool is awesome,” says Chantell Douglas, a Medical Assistant with Homedica. “It’s awesome because there are not many places that are offering this technology. It is not complicated at all. It’s voice command and it actually listens.”
Provider Response and Productivity
James Ratliff, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Carpenter Health Network, calls Hippo Virtual Care “an absolute differentiator” that brings “an acute solution to an acute problem.” He echoes other providers within the network who say the platform has improved service times, providing patients with access to specialty providers (or lower-level staff guided by specialty providers) within minutes — without patients needing to leave their rooms or homes.
“(Hippo) allows us to extend our skillset to folks that don't have the same skillset, but are capable of providing quality medical care at our direction. It will help those folks to develop in their ability to treat people. The solution allows us to be able to cover more, help more, and be in places that we wouldn't have been able to be, given the time and distance of delivering that care. It brings us all together into that circle of care right when patients need it — not at a later point in time.”
Efficiency and Financial Impact
Not only do professionals within Carpenter cite Hippo’s affordable price point, but they are also quick to note the cost savings generated by the platform’s ability to reduce needless patient and provider travel, as well as reduce unnecessary hospitalizations and discharges.
“One thing that I definitely noticed immediately once we started utilizing Hippo was that we identified a lot of our hospitalizations and our discharges that weren’t necessarily needed were occurring after hours and on the weekends,” says Justin Lindsey, Administrator of Center Point Health and Rehab. “Being able to prevent those hospitalizations does reduce cost. We’ve been able to maintain our census. We’ve been able to reduce transportation costs by being able to keep residents here in the building. If a hospitalization can be prevented, we absolutely 100% want to prevent it from happening, and this platform allows us to do that.”
Quality Outcomes
Ultimately, Hippo and the healthcare professionals across the Carpenter Health Network share one goal above all others: superior patient care. According to Lindsey, the Hippo Virtual Care platform has helped the network achieve that goal.
“Hippo has played a very large role in our ability to increase the quality of care that we provide here in the facility, mainly because of continuity of care,” he says. “Each provider is able to ultimately make a better decision based on the equipment that we’re utilizing.”
Dr. Ratliff calls Hippo “the wave of the future,” describing it as “technology applied with a personal touch.” He says Carpenter’s continuity of care includes the participation of the network’s full resources — from social workers to those professionals who guide care — after the transitions that occur during their hospital care or recovery journey.
“It’s imperative for us to provide and deliver superior care,” he says. “It’s imperative for us to be at the bedside, wherever that bedside is. And Hippo does that.”
Learn how the Hippo Virtual Care™ platform can bolster your network’s continuity of care.
