BACKGROUND
Virtual home-based hospital services can provide high quality healthcare services while reducing the burden on hospitals through early discharge or prevention of admission. However, there is a gap in research around the technologies being deployed by these services, and how implementation, patient and service outcomes are being evaluated.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of this review is to provide an overview of the use of technology and key evidence for current home-based virtual care programs and the outcomes that have been used to measure their effectiveness and implementation.
METHODS
A scoping review was conducted based on the Joanna Briggs Institute framework for conducting a scoping review. CINAHL, Scopus, Medline, Embase, Emcare, and the Cochrane Library databases were searched in consultation with an academic librarian.
RESULTS
From 8,953 search results, 24 unique acute or subacute virtual care services were identified from 26 studies. While 20.8% of services provided hospital-at-home care for multiple conditions, 79.2% provided virtual care services for specific conditions including post-surgical rehabilitation, moderate COVID-19 infections, acute exacerbations of chronic conditions, and subacute stroke care. The duration of patient monitoring ranged from one day to three months. Reporting of technology details was poor, with the devices, capacity, function, usability, and software application unstated in several articles.
Outcomes measured to evaluate the 24 services varied. Nine types of implementation outcomes, 11 types of service outcomes, and 12 types of patient outcomes were identified across the studies. However, the tools used to measure these outcomes varied greatly, and 48% of services did not use any standardised outcome measures for evaluation.
CONCLUSIONS
This review found that acute and subacute virtual care services mostly provide targeted subacute care for specific conditions. However, the technologies utilised by these services were underreported and there was wide variation in the types and methods of outcome evaluation to measure their success.
