Home sweet home and some other lessons

David Font

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine explains that the Department of Health in Victoria, Australia in 2010, announced the construction of a 500-bed hospital without using bricks. This virtual hospital currently receives 33,000 patients per year. And the introductory paragraph of the article ends by asking: What was the incredible technological progress that made it possible? Caring for the patient at home!

Let's continue without leaving the house. I remember post by Jordi Varela introducing the experience of Buurtzorg Netherlands, the Dutch home care company, described as a success story by King's Fund. During a Congress in Barcelona, I heard Jos de Blok, the leader of the project, explaining the experience as a paradigm of innovation success. Let's see why.

Virtual Units: a model to prevent hospital readmissions?

Glòria Galvez

Hospital readmissions are one of the expressions of the complex relationship between the different levels of care, as well as an important indicator of quality. Many of these readmissions are unavoidable and justified, but many of them are inadequate and could be prevented by changes in the care protocol of the registered patient. Even so, an intervention to reduce readmissions has not been found yet.

In an issue of JAMA magazine, Dr. Dhalla, an internist at St. Michael Hospital and professor at the University of Toronto, evaluates and compares the results of a virtual unit with those obtained by providing routine care to reduce readmissions and deaths after hospital discharge. The virtual units were created in 2004 in the United Kingdom for their alleged potential to reduce hospital readmissions, but had not yet been rigorously evaluated. The basic idea is simple: it’s about using already proven care systems from the hospital setting (equipment, coverage, access, etc.) and applying them to complex and high-risk patients in their own homes.