Smart home ward: decentralized at-home hospital-level care service in China (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the dangers of tying healthcare delivery to brick-and-mortar healthcare facilities and has highlighted an ongoing need to create a distributed healthcare delivery ecosystem centered in patients’ homes and the community. Hospital-at-home has been practiced for several decades. However, the wide adoption and implementation of hospital-at-home by patients and service providers remain low. Based on the 5G smart hospital infrastructure, we further explored the smart home ward to extend hospital-based care services to the home setting, which strives to break through the "wall" of trapping centralized hospital-based healthcare services. The home smart ward is a seamless hospital unit managed by health professionals in the hospital. Patients at home receive hospital-level services, including medical monitoring, ward rounds, consultation, and medical care. Smart home ward can be adopted with the two hospital-at-home models: early-supported discharge (ESD) and admission avoidance (AA), offering integrated health monitoring services, medical care, and rehabilitation in the home setting.