Assessment of home-based hospitalization in Spain

Home-based hospitalization (HBH) is a healthcare service where, for a certain amount of time, health practitioners provide active treatment in the patient’s home for conditions that would otherwise require acute in-hospital care. HBH has two main objectives: to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and to allow early discharge. In both cases, the link with acute hospital care is fundamental.

The authors’ main goal was to assess the safety and efficacy of this practice, but also to analyze the situation of this practice at the time of writing (2014), but also to learn about the experts’ opinion. Regarding the safety and efficacy assessment, the authors have performed a systematic search of the literature on the websites such as Pubmed, Web of Science, Medes, The Cochrane Library and Tripdatabase. The search ended in October 2014. A couple of included articles were updated after this date, and these were also included.

Seven (7) systematic reviews of RCTs were identified and included in this AQuAS paper. The conclusions differ, because the scopes of the RCTs were different; however, the general conclusion, based on these, is that HBH is positively associated with outcomes in mortality, re-admission, costs, and patient and carer satisfaction. The authors note that the methodological quality of these reviews was considered moderate-low.

See the full report in Spanish or Catalan (with abstract in English) here.

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