Sheba Study: Home Care Better Than Hospital For Acute Patients

A new study by Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest and internationally ranked hospital, found that remote hospital care at home, supervised by a physician, yields better outcomes for acutely ill patients than an actual stay in hospital.  

 The first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed study was carried out at Beyond, Sheba’s virtual hospital. It was led by Prof. Gad Segal, the head of Sheba Education Authority, in collaboration with Sheba physicians and Noa Zychlinski, Professor of Data and Decision Science at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. 

The study involved a total of 636 patients – 159 who received hospital-at-home (HAH) care and 477 patients who received hospital care. 

It included both COVID and non-COVID patients, Sheba said. Patients in the latter group had one of three acute infectious diseases: urinary tract infection, pneumonia or cellulitis.

The study found that the median length of hospital stay was two days shorter for the HAH patients, in both the COVID and non-COVID groups. The risk of death within 30 days was also significantly lower for the HAH patients, in both the COVID and non-COVID groups.

“The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated two long-term challenges for acute care – insufficient beds and space in hospitals to treat all of the acute patients, and a shortage of internal medicine specialists to treat patients. When confronted with these challenges we decided to seek out a viable alternative to in-hospital stay,” said Segal. 

“This is the first study to show that telemedicine-managed, physician-supervised, hospital-at-home care is not inferior but even superior to in-hospital stays, presenting a major step forward for the hospitals and health systems across the world,” he said. The results of the study were recently published in the PLOS One Journal.