July 15, 2020 (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal)
Jacksonville will be the command center for Mayo Clinic’s new entry into providing home health care, a program it believes will allow patients who have been hospitalized to go home sooner while continuing to receive care.
The program, supported by technology from Boston-based Medically Home, goes beyond video calls with doctors, a common form of home health care, and scales bigger than doctors making house calls, Mayo internist Dr. Michael Maniaci told the Business Journal.
Through the program, doctors working from a Jacksonville command center teleconference with paramedics, nurses and other clinicians who visit patients in their homes. The clinicians can provide services like infusions, skilled nursing, medications, laboratory and imaging services, behavioral health and rehabilitation services – services typically performed in the hospital before a patient can be released.
“The way to think of this is Mayo Clinic has eight floors, and this is the 9th, virtual floor of our hospital,” said Maniaci. “We really are able to provide almost all the care we give in our brick and mortar hospital in the patient’s home.”
The program is designed to get stabilized patients out of hospitals faster. For example, pneumonia patients typically require four to six days in a hospital, Maniaci said. With Mayo’s new home health care capabilities, that patient would be in a hospital for one or two days, then receive the rest of their care at home.
“This is almost like a transfer from the ICU to a medical floor, except it’s transferring from the ICU into a virtual floor at your home,” said Maniaci.
Creating a virtual Mayo Clinic floor was a goal that predates Covid-19. Maniaci began working on it in August. The goal at the time was to have the program in place by 2030 to get ahead of trends in consumer preference – essentially making health care more like customers’ experience on Amazon.
“Really this is a part of a broader stroke of knowing that the hospital of the future isn’t the hospital we think of today,” said Maniaci.
But with the outbreak of Covid-19, patients seeking elective procedures were kept away from hospitals to avoid infection, patients needing emergency care faced the risk of infection while hospitalized and hospitals nationwide feared a shortage of beds. The time to create a virtual floor was now.
“Covid hasn’t done a lot of good things for people, but one thing it has done is it’s taken this long-term strategy we have and shown everybody it’s valid,” said Maniaci. “The model of care is a necessity.”
The program is being piloted in Jacksonville and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, for six months. Jacksonville will be the first to be deployed, and the program in Wisconsin will be run from the Jacksonville command center.
“Those patients will be seen by our physicians and nurses in our command center here in Jacksonville. The hands on the ground – the EMS, advanced practice providers, nurse practioners – will be located there in Wisconsin,” said Maniaci.
The plan is for the program to start small, spending the first couple months testing the system, the supply chain and the level of care, Maniaci said. He hopes the program will be handling 20 patients a day by the fall.
“From there, if it works well, then we’ll expand it throughout the Mayo enterprise,” said Maniaci.
Maniaci knows that with any change, there is often hesitation, but he expects with time, transferring patients still in need of care to their homes will be normal for both physicians and patients.
“I would hope by this time next year, it would be the expectation of patients that once their care is done here, they will want to go home,” he said. “The won’t want to stay in this brick and mortar hospital. They will want to have everything done and say, ‘I’ll be at my house to finish the rest.’”