Boston-based Mass General Brigham is expanding its Home Hospital services by offering acute care at home for patients who have cancer.
The expansion allows the health system to continue its efforts to alleviate the capacity crisis at traditional brick-and-mortar facilities.
Home Hospital clinicians have been specially trained to support oncology patients and work closely with a team from the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute to ensure seamless coordination of care, the organization said.
While chemotherapy will continue to be administered in a clinical setting, eligible oncology patients can receive their oral cancer medications at home while being treated for other medical needs, including infections such as pneumonia, COVID-19 or complications from their cancer treatments.
Mass General Brigham Home Hospital has previously admitted a small number of patients with cancer, particularly those requiring treatment for medical conditions unrelated to their cancer diagnosis, such as heart failure, infections, gastrointestinal complications, and skin infections, and that will continue.
“In oncology, there is growing awareness about the idea of time toxicity, which is an acknowledgement of the time that patients spend traveling to healthcare facilities for their treatment and how that prevents them from being where they would rather be,” said Thomas Roberts, M.D., M.B.A., an oncologist and clinical director of Oncology Services for Mass General Brigham Healthcare at Home, in a statement. “In most cases, where they’d like to be is at home with their support system. Shifting care to the home also helps us protect these vulnerable patients from hospital-acquired infections and ease capacity constraints on our brick-and-mortar hospitals.”
Mass General Brigham runs one of the largest home hospitals in the country, offering services to 72 different communities around Greater Boston through five of its hospitals — Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Salem Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital.
This clinical expansion is aligned with the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute’s vision to harness the power of its entire system to expand cancer care beyond large academic hospitals so that patients can access care near or in their homes.
Aligned with this systemwide vision, Home Hospital has expanded its capabilities to manage enteral nutrition, implanted ports or central venous catheters and oral cancer medications. As Home Hospital continues to grow, additional capabilities will be added in the future, such as transfusions and intravenous antineoplastic treatments.
Since its inception, Mass General Brigham’s Home Hospital has been steadily growing in size and services while building the operational capabilities needed to safely scale the care model. Over the years, Home Hospital has expanded support to patients in post-operative recovery, including those recovering from colorectal, intra-abdominal and spinal surgeries, as well as postpartum patients with hypertension.
In January, Healthcare Innovation interviewed Stephen Dorner, M.D., M.P.H., the program’s chief clinical and innovation officer, about how the program is expanding. “We’ve just launched a pathway to take patients who undergo lumbar spine surgery and are constantly looking to find new surgical pathways that we could enable to help patients recover at home after an operation,” he said. “And many folks thought you would never take those patients. But it’s created that positive feedback loop where once some of the surgeons have heard the positive stories of their own patients, it’s generated this interest and they want their patients to benefit from that. That’s really how things start to grow in an organic, grassroots kind of a way.”
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