“Mayo Building Home Hospital Model One Region, And Supply Chain, At A Time” – DiagnosticsWorldNews.com

With a proper supply chain around a population of patients, and medical experts available to remotely oversee their care, a home could theoretically be transformed into a hospital on a moment’s notice. It’s a pioneering idea that the Mayo Clinic began actively exploring this summer with a pair of pilot programs in Jacksonville, Florida, and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The Advanced Care at Home model is expected to serve up to 60 patients by the end of this year, expanding to well over 1,000 patients across the country and world by the end of 2022, according to Michael Maniaci, M.D., chair of the division of hospital internal medicine at Mayo Clinic Florida in Jacksonville.

Advanced Care at Home is an innovative approach to remote healthcare that “goes beyond telehealth,” says Maniaci. The breadth of the model is limited only by the strength of a supply chain—diagnostic laboratories, retail and specialty pharmacies, rehabilitation providers, home health nursing, durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, and infusion therapy services—within a roughly 25-mile radius of patients.

“I can take care of patients here in Jacksonville, up in northern Wisconsin, in Los Angeles and technically also in Spain as long as the supply chain there can deliver care that is up to my standard,” he says. With that infrastructure in place, individual Mayo physicians could on any given day be remotely caring for 20 to 30 patients living just about anywhere.

The supply chain needs to be within a certain proximity to patients to get the Amazon-like turnaround time on labs and the delivery of medications and DME, Maniaci continues. Patients are eventually going to start expecting that level of convenience. “We need to stop focusing on building hospitals and start focusing on building supply chains.”

Read the full article at Diagnostics World News.