Bruce Leff, MD, MACP: Discussing ‘Hospital at Home’ Program, Important Takeaways

During this segment of his HCPLive interview at the 2024 American College of Physicians (ACP) Internal Medicine Meeting, Bruce Leff, MD, MACP, discussed what he hopes internal medicine physicians viewing ‘Hospital at Home for Older Adults: Outcomes and Implementation’ walk away understanding.

Leff is known for his work in geriatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as professor of medicine. After his ACP 2024 presentation, he discussed the Hospital at Home program and was asked about what he hopes internists remember from his presentation.

“I hope they walk away with the idea that hospital care may not be quite as safe as they might imagine,” Leff explained. “I think they should walk away with the idea that it is possible to deliver high quality acute hospital level care in patients' homes and that this does take some rewiring of the health system. But if we can do this, we have the opportunity to create over the next several decades, what I think will end up being a home and community based continuum of care.”

Leff noted that based on current trends, he could see the hospital of the future having many intensive care units. But he hopes things will shift into the community and into the home.

“Hospital at Home, by virtue of having to build out the supply chain and logistics and information platforms and data sharing to do that, all of that can trickle down to other modalities of care in the home,” Leff said. “You know, if you think about the development of hospitals, the buildings have always been there. But what we do in those buildings has changed a lot. Over time when I was an intern, you got a cardiac cath, you stayed a night in the hospital.”

For context, Leff recalled a moment from his childhood in which his aunt stayed at New York Eye and Ear for cataract surgery for a week in the hospital, blindfolded.

“Because we didn't even know about REM sleep back then,” Leff explained. “They didn't want people's eyes to move around and they didn't realize that they were zapping around all through the night and probably a lot of people died of pulmonary embolism just being in bed for a week. So what we do and have done in hospitals will change over time. We must think about ways to do that which help preserve taxpayer dollars.”

For further information, view the full interview segment posted above.

The quotes contained in this summary were edited for clarity. Leff has no relationships with entities whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.