How Remote Collaboration Benefits Home Healthcare Patients
Novemebr 16, 2023
The home healthcare industry in the United States is reaching a breaking point.
Over the last three decades, home healthcare has grown from 50 percent of all healthcare to 70 percent of all healthcare.
This growth has been driven by the number of baby boomers who’ve reached age 70, and who are now dealing with an increased number of health issues, including chronic conditions.
Home health agencies are struggling to carry the load. Like the vast majority of other healthcare sectors, the home care sector is experiencing staff shortages.
The shortages are primarily due to burnout, as home care professionals spend most of their time going from home to home, providing care while being isolated from the rest of their care teams. As a result, the home care industry has a 65 percent annual turnover rate.
Not only does such considerable turnover present significant hiring and training costs for home health agencies — roughly $5,000 per staff member each time that turnover occurs — it can also lead to fragmented, interrupted, or otherwise limited patient care.
Remote collaboration can help address both of these negative trends.
Creating the Ideal Patient Encounter
The Hippo Virtual CareTM platform combines the latest in hands-free, voice-enabled wearable computing with medical-grade software to provide a “through the eyes of the clinician” viewpoint – enabling remote specialists to collaborate virtually with local clinician extenders wearing the headset to diagnose and treat patients, as if they were physically in the room.
Hippo was built around the idea of the ideal patient encounter. Every collaborative visit can be made better by the platform, wherever it takes place. With our system, when a care provider is wearing the headset, the patient and those family members and physicians who aren’t present can collaborate as if they were there in person.
Our technology improves home healthcare in three ways:
- Hippo Virtual Care improves capability and teamwork for home caregivers who can often feel isolated and unsupported.
- Our platform encourages team-based care, which is critical for patients with chronic conditions. Multiple physicians can see the same patient at the same time, decide what all the issues are, then confer with each other at the end of the day to come up with a comprehensive care plan.
- It encourages a whole circle of care. A care team is much more than a physician and nurse. As opposed to telehealth, patients can have family members, physicians, and clinicians all in the same meeting. Family members or primary caregivers can use their phones to join meetings and hear doctors make presentations and provide orders. Family and caregivers can better understand issues, provide information, and ask questions — all to help support patients’ care in the future.
“Patients want personal relationships with people who have the job of taking care of them, and taking care of all this complexity in the system. They want a human who understands them and can empathize with them. It's our responsibility, it’s our mission, to give patients what they want — which is convenience, personal interaction, and efficiency — and give them what they need, which is high-quality, collaborative medicine and to get their care right first time, every time. That's our model.”
Hippo Virtual Care can help your home care teams achieve better outcomes for their patients.
Read our white paper on Why Health Systems Need to “Own the Home” Before Retailers and Payers Do.
