By Patrick Quinlan, MD

The current hospital-centric, hub-and-spoke model of care has become obsolete. It’s time to adopt a patient-centered approach that delivers care directly to patients, their families, and caregivers at home. This shift is essential for improving outcomes, reducing costs, and addressing the challenges of modern healthcare.

It’s time for Hippo Coactive Care.

THE NEXT ERA OF HEALTHCARE

Real progress in removing barriers, reducing disease burdens, and ensuring compliance with care plans happens at home. By meeting patients where they live, we can create the foundation for effective, value-based care. New technologies now make it possible to restore the trusted physician-patient relationships that have eroded due to staffing shortages, virtual care limitations, and inefficient follow-up processes.

A “home health hub” can address the needs of the 10% of patients who account for 70% of costs – primarily older adults with complex conditions who struggle to navigate the healthcare system. By improving communication and reducing errors in care transitions, this model minimizes suffering, optimizes outcomes, and simplifies an increasingly complex system.

This approach also benefits clinicians by reducing frustration, fostering success, and improving professional satisfaction. While the complexity of modern medicine is unavoidable, we can and must simplify how care is delivered to patients.

Home-based care anchored by Hippo Coactive Care can usher in the next, simpler era of healthcare – a solution that enhances lives, supports clinicians, and strengthens the system for everyone.

HOW WE GOT HERE

To build true patient-centered care, we must first understand how we arrived at today’s challenges.

In the rush to bring post-acute care into the home, health systems have repurposed hospital-based roles, processes, and systems for new programs – with little success.

Traditional acute care models are designed to handle complex episodes, requiring extensive staffing, logistics, administrative overhead, and reimbursement systems. These structures, however, are too cumbersome to support the simpler needs of remote care.

As a result, virtual care services like telehealth, chronic care management (CCM), remote patient monitoring (RPM), and transition care management (TCM) are delivering disappointing clinical and financial outcomes.

Acute and ambulatory care models essentially end at a facility’s doors. Patients may leave with self-care instructions, but current systems fail to provide meaningful support for ongoing care, behavior change, and improved outcomes once they’re home. This gap undermines the potential of remote care to truly enhance patient health and reduce costs.

Hippo Coactive Care – an augmented reality platform with collaborative workflow purpose-built for clinicians – can close this gap.

CREATING A NEW CIRCLE OF CARE

The term “Coactive Care” refers to a collaborative care model involving the active participation of multiple healthcare providers with patients. Professionals from different disciplines, including caregivers and family, form a “circle of care” to work together delivering comprehensive care for patients.

The Hippo Coactive Care platform enables this circle of care and team-based learning by leveraging augmented reality (AR) headsets. Hippo provides the latest in voice-activated, hands-free, remote collaboration and data capture technology with the world’s most advanced wearable computer platform, providing a “you are there” virtual experience for remote experts.

This model also features the addition of a new Clinician Extender^TM role – a nurse, clinician, or medical assistant – who physically works with patients and assists remote specialty physicians to facilitate expert guidance, educate patients, and support patients’ adoption of healthy behaviors.

Remote experts require a transparent “I see what you see” technology as they work closely with their Clinician Extenders and patients to assess, diagnose, guide, and reinforce patient care. Clinician Extenders need a non-obtrusive technology that allows them to work naturally in a hands-free way that does not distract them from their primary focus on the patient.

Hippo Coactive Care meets the needs of both.

The platform brings the Coactive Care team full circle to support patients wherever they are outside doctor’s offices and hospital walls.

The team-based workflow and expertise provided by Hippo Coactive Care helps health systems treat more patients while freeing up hospital beds, reducing readmissions, creating efficiencies, and improving outcomes.

A REFRESHING ALTERNATIVE

Hippo Coactive Care improves patient outcomes not only at home but also in nursing homes, rural clinics, urgent care centers, community care facilities, and even during EMT interventions. For patients with multiple chronic conditions, the platform integrates healthy behaviors into a simple, consistent self-care plan.

Providers find Hippo Coactive Care to be a refreshing alternative to high-capacity office models. Its patient-focused approach appeals to clinicians burned out by productivity-driven practices, making it easy to recruit volunteers for pilot programs.

Not only does our platform improve patient care quality and satisfaction, but it can also help health systems achieve better quality outcomes per dollar spent on care. It also helps health systems treat more patients while freeing up hospital beds and reducing the burdens associated with ancillary scale and administrative overhead.

Hippo Coactive Care delivers better outcomes by connecting actions, fostering accountability, and empowering both providers and patients.
Simply put, it’s a game-changing model for modern healthcare.

Learn more about how you can bring the hospital to the home and extend the reach of specialty care with Hippo Coactive Care.