Opinion: What the hospital-at-home movement tells us about igniting innovation in health care
Why did wider adoption of hospital-at-home hospital strategies have to wait for a national public health emergency?
As a health care economist who studies innovation, and as a management consultant who helps health systems and insurers adopt new technologies, we have had a ringside seat to a frustrating phenomenon: The large private sector of the U.S. health system can move faster to adopt valuable innovations than the public sector burdened by red tape and politics. But before adopting an innovation at scale, the private sector too often waits for the public sector to take the first step — sometimes for decades.
Consider the case of “hospital at home,” a fast-moving, innovative model that delivers acute hospital care to patients in their own homes. Hospital at home has made headlines recently, but it could have achieved scale far sooner if incentives to invest in the model had been properly aligned.
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