THE COMEBACK OF The House Call
IN 2020 , the coronavirus pandemic pushed patients to seek ways of avoiding virus exposure at potentially crowded health care facilities , and homebased health care offered one possible solution . For several years , there has been a movement to resurrect this oft-romanticized notion of health care : the doctor , black bag in tow , visits a patient on a house call .
House calls are convenient for the patient , there is less travel and wait time , it can address mobility or transportation issues , and it can give the visiting physician or nurse a bigpicture idea of the environmental factors affecting the patient ’ s health .
“ The idea of going back to a time when a clinician or a doctor comes to your home for a visit , I think we ’ re going to see more of that ,” says Joel Gray , executive director of Anthem Blue Cross ’ California Medicaid health plan .
Heal , a Los Angeles-based health tech startup offering in-home visits and telehealth appointments , launched in 2015 . The company has doctors in markets across the country , including Sacramento . In June 2020 , CNBC included the company at No . 13 on its list of 50 private companies “ poised to emerge from the pandemic as the next generation of billion-dollar businesses .” The company reported to L . A . Biz that
it saw requests for in-home doctor visits surge 200 percent in March 2020 over the previous month .
In 2019 , CareMore Health , a subsidiary of Anthem Blue Cross , launched a home care program for Medi-Cal consumers in the Sacramento area who are chronically ill and have complex health care needs . The program was launched to help address mobility issues or transportation issues that those patients have to navigate .
The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Hospitals Without Walls program in March 2020 as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic . The program provides eligible hospitals with unprecedented regulatory flexibilities to treat eligible patients in their homes . “ The hospital moves the patient from the hospital setting back to their home , ( with ) the equipment needed to monitor them , and does rounds and has clinicians come back to the house and see the patient ,” says Gray .
This at-home hospital care program helped enhance hospital capacity during the surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations , preserve personal protective equipment and put less strain on resources during a crisis .
– Eva Roethler
The U . S . tends to have worse health outcomes compared to other countries , despite advanced facilities and high health care spending . It ’ s time consuming and inconvenient : It takes the average patient two hours to visit a doctor for 20 minutes , and there are also major health disparities in marginalized and underserved communities .
Put bluntly , U . S . health care is inefficient and expensive . Digital solutions have been poised to help solve these problems , but narrow policies have kept them sidelined . Until now . The coronavirus pandemic forced the country to reassess how and where health care is delivered , which resulted in a number of dramatic changes . The most notable of which is the astronomical rise of telehealth .
Trends in telehealth
In 2019 , UC Davis Health held 1,200 video visits . In 2020 , it conducted 132,400 video visits . That is year-overyear growth of over 10,000 percent . “ In the last 40 years , I have never seen such a watershed moment ,” says Dr . Ashish Atreja .
Atreja is a gastroenterologist and the chief information and digital health officer at UC Davis Health . Atreja has been championing digital health for most of his career . He was conducting video visits in the early 2000s on clunky , expensive monitors well before smartphones became ubiquitous . He has gained an industry reputation for his embrace of digital health . Among other accomplishments , he founded NODE . Health , a nonprofit that applies “ the rigor of evidence-based medicine to digital health .”
Before the coronavirus pandemic forced changes , he says it was mostly “ geek ” doctors and advocates talking about technology in health care . Since the temporary policy expansions scaled the implementation of telehealth , Atreja says , “ COVID demystified and democratized ( digital health ) and made it accessible to physicians and patients like never before .”
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