Hospital-at-Home Steps out of the COVID-Era Through New Atrium Health, Best Buy Partnership

Fierce Healthcare | By Annie Burky

Both Atrium Health and Best Buy Health employed their respective at-home care programs during the COVID-19 pandemic when hospitals were a hotbed for the virus and providers were scrambling to provide care.

Today, the duo announced a partnership to develop a new hospital-at-home offering for a post-pandemic world.

Atrium Health launched its virtual inpatient care program to treat COVID patients from the comfort of their own homes. Best Buy Health has grown its remote care enterprise solution through a series of acquisitions and partnerships with companies like Current Health and TytoCare.

Rasu Shrestha, M.D., chief innovation and commercialization officer at Advocate Health, Atrium’s parent company, believes that the new collaboration will illuminate at-home care and expand Atrium’s current offering.

“This transition that happens from discharging a patient from a hospital to the void of their home is the dark side of the moon: It's disconnected, confusing, expensive,” Shrestha told Fierce Healthcare. “What we've been doing in the past is working through our hospital home program and manually putting together a lot of these devices. By working with Best Buy Health, we're developing the seamless connected care experience and an opportunity to truly scale this.”

Since launching its hospital-at-home program in March 2020, Atrium has met 6,300 patients at home while redirecting 25,000 hospital bed days, according to Shrestha. “In the context of traditional brick-and-mortar facilities, that’s a 100-bed hospital,” he noted.

Atrium’s at-home hospital program was initially designed for COVID and COVID-presumptive patients. Now, the suite of solutions is meeting a growing cadre of patients diagnosed with chronic cardiac conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, asthma, infections and other medical and postoperative conditions.