Hospital at home

Why we are nurturing clients in a home-based care environment.

• Research shows that patients recover better and faster in their own homes resulting in better clinical outcomes, improved patient experience, lower mortality, and complication rates, as well as lower costs.
• Additionally, patients treated at home are not exposed to hospital-acquired infections and new functional impairments.
• Furthermore, there is a pressing need to alleviate the pressure on overburdened healthcare systems while enabling access to quality and affordable care.
• Medscheme has demonstrated that our healthcare system is ripe for the adoption of innovative solutions that offer viable and safe alternatives to hospitals, and elevate the importance and relevance of the patient’s own home as a setting for access to and delivery of healthcare.
• Our recent data shows that this innovative approach has the potential to save costs for the health system as a whole, by reducing unnecessary extended hospital admissions and avoidable hospitalisation.
• Volumes of HBC (home-based care) cases: When looking at the proportion of total cases we receive that are HBC (Hospital at Home + Home Nursing). We note that there’s been an average increase of 11.7% since 2020.

• Savings: When looking at savings we consider only cases that are eligible for ATH and compare the average difference in cost between HBC cases and traditional in-hospital cases. From these results we note that an average of 63% of a case cost can be saved by treating  cases in a HBC setting. This has been estimated for hospital avoidance cases.
• For cases that have a combination of in-hospital treatment and HBC we find an average saving per case of 27% when compared to traditional in-hospital only cases.
• Readmissions: When comparing the all cause 30 day readmission rate for case types that are eligible for HBC we find that readmissions rates are on average around 74% lower when cases are treated in HBC setting compared to traditional in-hospital treatment only.