5 minute read
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
The 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 di erent use cases, diseases and conditions and the data gathered enables care to be more predictive, e ective 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 a er 1000 patients with four doctors and nurses; now you can look a er 2000 patients with the same team,” says Dan Vahdat, CEO of Huma. “You need to have a small portion of your sta focussed and dedicated to looking a er 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, o en 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 le 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 a er yourself and change behaviours so you’re better o ,” says Dan.
“Collecting the data also enables your care team to flag you through a system automatically, communicate with you and get to you proactively before a condition becomes really complicated. It’s a no brainer because the alternative is, if you’re at home and something goes wrong, you’re severely deteriorated by the time you show up in hospital.”
With elderly patients, the concern has been their lack of exposure to digital technology. However, Dan has found that in the past two years the number of seniors adopting technology has increased by 38 per cent. “The biggest age group on our platform is between 60 to 80 years old and they’re using it, so I think that shows to some extent that most elderly people will use a solution if it helps them. For those who might not be able to do so, we have created a feature called caregiver or proxy, which is a family member or carer. You can interact and input information on the patient’s behalf.”
Utilising the data
The intersection of technology, computing, AI and medicine is now creating the ideal conditions for proper research into many areas. “Suddenly you have real time, clean, organised, actionable data that, on the clinician or hospital side, means we can flag the patients automatically. We can start predicting certain trends if need be. And this way we’re always ahead of problems and we can make the care more proactive rather than reactive. That’s the big promise that everybody has been looking to deliver for many years,” says Dan.
The platform can also be used to monitor patients in clinical trials or research studies so, as well as being cared for remotely, they are also providing data to verify the drug is doing what it is supposed to do as the patient lives their daily life. “Historically clinical trials were more controlled but this is a better development as it considers the lifestyle of the patient,” Dan says. “Sometimes a drug might help you to keep pain free but it could mean you are sleeping all day or you are immobilised, so it’s not necessarily the best treatment. This kind of technology brings the human aspect of your life into the trial as well.”
Data provided by Huma on COVID wards was instrumental in helping to update government guidance on blood saturation levels to spot hypoxia and to deal with it straight away. “It’s the simplicity of the deployment,’ says Dan. “When we entered the market in Germany we went from nothing to having a platform that was ready and deployed across all the major health care systems in the country. This important because if you can learn something in a few weeks and can double the capacity of your hospitals without needing to build hospitals, which take time and are expensive, then the healthcare system sees immediate benefits.”
Currently Huma operates in the UK, Germany, France, the UAE and Saudi Arabia where there are national initiatives. They are also rolling out in India, demonstrating for Dan that such technology is not just for modern countries but can be implemented across the board. “The beauty is it relies on the mobile phone so many people can access it in a very democratised way,” he says, adding; “This delivery of care gives access to hospitals in ways that weren’t possible before, so how can we make it better, more personalised for the patients, more predictive, more human? We always try to add the right features to make it as simple as possible for the patient because at the end of the day you want to have it running in the background.
“I want to have hospitals at home in each country in the world and enable participants and patients everywhere in the world to be part of studies and clinical research. And if you make that happen, it’s good for everybody.”
Dan Vahdat CEO Huma
Contact Information
www.huma.com
