EP 107: Designing the Hospital at Home | Helen Ouyang

Can hospital care be delivered at home? Will the hospital of the future only consist of ERs, ORs and ICUs?

Dr. Helen Ouyang is an emergency physician, Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Her writing has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and funded by The Pulitzer Center. Helen has worked in 20 countries across five continents in public health and humanitarian assistance. Her publications have also appeared in many academic medical journals, including The Lancet and JAMA, and she currently serves as a reviewer for Annals of Emergency Medicine and Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. She is also a mentor-editor for The OpEd Project. Until 2015, Helen was the Associate Director of Columbia’s International Emergency Medicine Fellowship. After graduating with a bachelor of arts from Brown University, Helen went to medical school at Johns Hopkins and studied for a master’s in public health at Harvard, where she was also a Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. Upon completing her training at Harvard, at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, she moved out to the Pacific Northwest before finding her way back to the East Coast.

Episode mentions and links:

https://helenouyang.com

Your Next Hospital Bed Might Be At Home via NY Times Magazine

Can Virtual Reality Help Ease Chronic Pain via NY Times Magazine

Restaurant Helen would take you to: Bernie’s Restaurant

Follow Helen: Twitter | LinkedIn

Episode Reflection

“You see patients in their place of power, it’s a totally different thing,” De Pirro says. “That magical difference.” 


This quote from Dr. De Pirro taken from Helen Ouyang’s NY Times Magazine article that we discussed in this week’s episode really stuck with me. Helen does an AMAZING job illustrating such a vibrant picture with her writing. In the article, she follows a leader in the hospital-at-home space as she visits a number of patients. One, a 92-year-old woman getting IV antibiotics and diuretics at home, while her attentive son proudly stated that she was getting better. Another, a man who preferred to be seen by the doctor while on his porch, was getting treated for dehydration, but more importantly was able to get some solid advice about his nutrition, which the provider noted seemed to consist mostly of soda and candy. Later, we meet Rita, an 87-year-old woman who, despite having her sepsis improve in the hospital, was not thriving and whose recovery had stalled. After a significant effort to set Rita up with hospital-at-home services in her Appalachian home with her family by her side, she began to eat and get out of bed again. The beginning of Rita’s story is a story I’d wager everyone has heard before. Someone enters the hospital, but recovery is slow, despite the treatment being “successful.” Dr. Ouyang doesn’t sugarcoat things or present home care as a panacea for everything that ails our health system either. There are some real challenges and questions to be answered about how we don’t create a new way to estrange and devalue those who are most vulnerable in our society. But thinking back to the quote I pulled at the beginning, it’s pretty damn incredible to see humans being treated as whole humans within our healthcare system. I have a family member who had a prolonged hospital stay recently. Surgery complicated by infection, then delirium, then decompensation, then discharge home, with no support. A week-long stay turned into a month. Knowing my family member, and their fiery sense of independence, I can say with 100% certainty that hospital-at-home would have been the right choice for her and I hope that someday, should I be in her shoes, I’ll have the choice to heal in my place of power, my most comforting place, surrounded by my family in my own home.

Written by Rob Pugliese

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EP 108: Designing Through the Lens of Policy | Rick Griffith

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EP 106: Designing Health Across Scales | Joanne Cheung