Creating hospitals at home Enabling people around the world to live longer and more fulfilling lives through technology is a realistic goal, Huma CEO Dan Vahdat tells Sarah Cartledge
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he idea of hospitals at home has been gaining traction in recent years as secondary care buildings require constant updating as medicine advances and populations increase. Thanks to the rapid uptake of digital technology in the healthcare sector, the concept is becoming reality with companies such as Huma spearheading the way. Huma’s vision is very simple. Instead of patients accessing healthcare through hospital or clinic appointments, an application connects a series of devices so that patients can interact and be connected
to the care centres. The platform is configured for different use cases, diseases and conditions and the data gathered enables care to be more predictive, effective and scalable. The pandemic has accelerated this trend as patients have become used to the idea of taking more responsibility for their own conditions. Huma has worked with the NHS in the UK and with key institutions in Germany to roll out the platform and has seen it more than double the capacity of hospitals within a short space of time. “Once you could look after 1000 patients with four doctors and nurses; now you can
look after 2000 patients with the same team,” says Dan Vahdat, CEO of Huma. “You need to have a small portion of your staff focussed and dedicated to looking after these patients in a new way, but ultimately it prevents a lot of the repetitive work that was done previously.” Benefitting the patient Most patients visit a clinician, often via an outpatient appointment, two or three times a year to monitor an ongoing condition. However, they can deteriorate at any point and 98 per cent of the time they are left alone in the real world. “By bringing a technology that can simply sit in your pocket and is always with you, it helps you to be connected to your care team and to be educated about it. This way you can look after yourself and change behaviours so you’re better off,” says Dan.
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