Patients who underwent a low-risk surgical procedure and opted to stay at Mayo Clinic's hybrid "Care Hotel" instead of a hospital reported having a positive experience, according to the results of a new survey published in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery.
The Care Hotel, a virtual medicine hybrid model of care established at Mayo Clinic's Jacksonville, Florida, location in 2020, provides patients with in-person and virtual care following surgery or other procedures.
Of the 93 survey responses analyzed by researchers, 87% of patients reported that they had a positive experience while 94% said they would probably recommend the program to others. The study was conducted between July 23, 2020, and June 4, 2021. Fifty-five percent of the patient’s surveyed were men, and the median age was 60.2 years old.
The authors pointed out that as hospital bed capacity became limited during the COVID-19 pandemic, hospital officials turned to alternative methods of care such as the Care Hotel.
In addition, there are also economic advantages associated with the hybrid model because the cost of an overnight stay is cheaper compared with hospital expenses.
Among the patients who answered the survey, the neurosurgery service reported having the highest number of postoperative patients treated at the Care Hotel (32%), followed by urology patients (24%), and ear nose and throat patients (13%).
“One of the strengths of this hybrid Care Hotel model is the combination of a daytime in-person registered nurse plus the physical availability of the paramedic staff with the virtual monitoring by both biometric devices as well as the virtual clinical team,” lead author Ryan M. Chadha, MD, with the department of Anesthesiology at Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, and colleagues wrote. “This hybrid model was able to limit the need for multiple in-person staff at the Care Hotel, which reduces both personnel costs and travel fatigue,”
Chadha et al. noted that the study did have limitations including that only 56% of patients responded to the survey.
“Therefore, extrapolation of these data to the whole patient sample might not be entirely reliable and might pose a substantial bias,” the authors added.
Read the full study here.