Healthcare is changing & we are here to help
During the pandemic, across the world, technology was used to help provide care to people while at home. This has enormous advantages for patients and health services alike and can of course be used for many more conditions than Covid-19. The cost of technology has dropped, the public’s appetite to use it has increased and expectations have changed fundamentally.
We are now seeing strong evidence that for major long term conditions, such as COPD and heart failure, home based pathways supported by simple digital tools can make a huge difference to hospitalisation rates. This is the future of health care. The acute hospital reserved for tackling the most serious issues and for surgery, all other health care provided at home, including where home is a care home, by clinicians working in new ways and with the support of digital tools.
There's much more to be done to harness this change and we work with teams across the NHS and health tech innovators to enable many more people to reap the benefits of care at home, supported by intuitive digital tools.
We don't only work in digital home care, our team supports wider digital health programmes too, such as the extensive work we have been involved in for people living with cancer.
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We are a small team with deep expertise in digital health and are passionate about helping more people to benefit from it. We therefore work with select NHS and private sector clients whose work is part of this mission. To meet the team and see more about what we do, click the button below.
History
Virtual Wards & Hospital At Home
The term “Virtual Ward” appears to have been coined first in Croydon, south London, in 2005 when home care for those with frailty was first trialled. This work was written up by Dr Geraint Lewis and colleagues and published in the International Journal of Integrated Care - Integrating care for high-risk patients in England using the virtual ward model: lessons in the process of care integration from three case sites (linked to at the Learn More button below.)
Following positive reported outcomes, a number of other sites in the UK and beyond implemented this model which sought to support older people at home with face to face care to seek to prevent unnecessary emergency admissions. There was however no digital component at this point.
There were also some examples in the UK of “hospital at home” type services that began at a similar time. These included home delivery of chemotherapy and early discharge schemes, such as supporting those at home post MSK joint replacement with nursing and physio input which was in place at the West Middlesex University Hospital from 2006.
Internationally, the concept of hospital at home began in the 1990s, and building on this, in 2006 the Australian Hospital at Home society met for the first time and sought to establish community and home based care, some of which was acute level. In the US Professor Bruce Leff of Johns Hopkins is seen as “the founding father of the “virtual hospital” concept and a promoter of the idea of a more comprehensive, patient-centric care ethic.
The model has continued in most countries, and in some cases focusing more on remote monitoring supported by digital tools than hospital replacement, but really began to scale during the Covid pandemic, with the introduction of virtual wards for Covid care from March 2020 in the UK and in many other countries.
Subsequently, ICS' in the NHS in England were required to establish virtual wards for other conditions, beginning with Acute Respiratory Infection and Frailty, in the December 2021 planning guidance, extending to Paediatrics and Heart Failure in 2023. Dedicated funding was made available to support the programme.