By adding adherence and connectivity capabilities to home-based solutions, clinicians can maintain open lines of communication with patients, helping patients better care for themselves from the comfort of their homes.
We are several years into the pandemic and the health sector continues to rely more heavily on home care solutions over hospital-based and face-to-face treatments.
We all know that the pandemic served as the impetus for the shift to home-based care, thereby highlighting the risks of contracting illnesses and hospital-acquired infections (HAI). The truth is that the risk of HAIs was high before the onset of Covid-19 and skyrocketed during the pandemic, exacerbating the standard infection ratio. As a consequence, people were and still are skeptical when going to hospitals. This change in behavior has led to a rise in adoption of home-based and telehealth solutions.
As such, the healthcare ecosystem was forced to adapt and create solutions for use outside the clinical setting. With the emergence of new technologies and capabilities, specifically within the infusion and drug delivery space, we can anticipate the move to the home continuing to grow in adoption. This shift will hopefully lead to improved and more personalized patient care.
The challenges of developing home-based care devices
Understandably, shifting care to the home is not an easy task for infusion therapy and drug delivery providers. Now, device manufacturers face unique challenges in trying to develop connected, self-administrated patient-centric solutions. Lacking access to patient treatment logs, safe administration and the difficulty in ensuring patient-adherence to medication regimens are just a few examples of the obstacles providers will need to overcome to help patients ‘self-treat’ at home.