Kaiser Permanente among top hospital-at-home care programs

Kaiser Permanente’s advanced care at home program was recently listed among the top hospital-at-home programs by Becker’s Health IT. Stephen Parodi, MD, executive vice president of External Affairs, Communications, and Brand for The Permanente Federation, discussed the origins of Kaiser Permanente’s advanced care at home program and why it’s a great example of health care innovation.

Related hospital at home story: Innovative hospital-at-home health care highlighted by Stephen Parodi, MD

Instead of building their advanced care at home program from scratch, Kaiser Permanente — along with the Mayo Clinic — made an investment in Medically Home, a technology and services platform specializing in at-home acute care delivery. The strategic partnership helps Permanente physicians and care teams effectively scale at-home care services for a range of clinical conditions typically treated in traditional hospital settings.

In fact, launching an advanced care at home program is similar to adding a rounding team in the hospital, said Dr. Parodi, who also serves as executive vice president of External Affairs and Corporate Development and associate executive director of The Permanente Medical Group. Dr. Parodi underscored the need to maintain the same level of medical excellence found in a traditional hospital setting at the patient’s home.

“What’s going to be incredibly important is that we have the appropriate baseline quality and safety parameters and hold ourselves and other health systems accountable for this type of care,” he said. “We think it should be at least as good as, if not better than, what we provide in a brick-and-mortar facility.”

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Kaiser Permanente has developed videos to describe this health care innovation to patients and clinicians and a framework to track the safety and quality of the acute care at home model.

Dr. Parodi added that because the program brings physicians, clinicians, and other members of the care team into patients’ homes, they can gain tremendous insights into the everyday lives of patients and their families, including social determinants of health.

“We can see if there’s risk of falling, whether there is food insecurity,” Dr. Parodi said. “And the medicines on their tables help us do better, more accurate medicine reconciliation. These insights are tremendously valuable if we want to see what truly ails our patients and the nation to lower the incidence of chronic disease.”

Note: You can read the full story on Becker’s Health IT website.