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Home Care Connect

More than 30,000 patients have benefitted from Home Care Connect™ virtual care program throughout the country.

Home Care Connect empowers patients to achieve their health goals and stay where they are most comfortable: at home. This integrated virtual care program has three main components:

  • Compassionate visiting nurses and therapists with clinical expertise
  • Advanced, easy-to-use remote monitoring technology
  • A 24-7 Virtual Care Center powered by specially-trained remote monitoring RNs

Home Care Connect goals

  • Enable proactive in-the-moment intervention to reduce preventable ER visits and hospitalizations and decrease total cost of care
  • Increase patient engagement and satisfaction

Home Care Connect benefits

  • Improves patients' health outcomes
  • Empowers patients to be more in control of their healthcare
  • Enables nurses to conduct in-the-moment intervention
  • Increases patient knowledge of medication and condition

How it works

Patients enrolled in the program receive a kit with a 4G-enabled tablet and wireless devices: a scale, pulse oximeter and blood pressure cuff. The visiting nurse or therapist trains the patient and caregivers on how to use it. The tablet uses a major wireless internet provider's 4G network; it does not use the patient's home internet.

Every day, the patient will follow the tablet's voice and text instructions and devices to self-report vital health information. He or she will also answer condition-specific questions. For example, patients with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) will report about their breathing that day. The patient will also complete a condition-specific education module and answer questions to increase knowledge.

The information about blood pressure, weight, health symptoms, etc, streams in real-time to Virtual Care Center, 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The patient's assigned Virtual Care Center nurse will review the information to see if he or she is doing better, the same or needs help. This proactive, in-the-moment intervention enables patients and the care team to address health changes that, if left undetected, could lead to ER visits or hospitalizations.

The nurse and patient can have a virtual visit instantly via the tablet's two-way video feature, which works like popular video apps Skype or FaceTime. Patients and their Virtual Care Center nurses can also add physicians and the patient's family members into the video conversation.

Shaping the future

Since launch in April 2017, the Home Care Connect program has had a positive impact on our national 30-day hospital readmission rate. It has reduced from approximately 13% to under 8% (as of September 2019). Every day, our Virtual Care Center nurses are helping patients avoid preventable ER visits and saving lives. Home Care Connect has had a favorable impact on patient and family engagement and satisfaction. We are now serving patients using the Home Care Connect program in eleven different states.

We are shaping the future of healthcare in support of our Mission.