Ariadne Labs and CaroNova Launch Home Hospital Early Adopters Accelerator

Boston, MA – Ariadne Labs, in collaboration with CaroNova, a health innovation incubator for the Carolinas, has launched the Home Hospital Early Adopters Accelerator Program to support health care systems to further develop their own home hospital programs. The program provides expertise in designing and managing home hospital programs via a network of hospitals who collectively learn, create, and implement together as a community.

With the expansion of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services Hospital Without Walls initiative to include the Acute Hospital Care at Home Waiver in November 2020, hospitals and health systems across the United States have been working to expand their services to treat acutely ill patients in the home. While home hospital programs have been shown to cost less and reduce risks associated with traditional hospital care, they can be difficult to develop and launch. 

Ariadne Labs and CaroNova partnered to launch the Home Hospital Early Adopters Accelerator to provide hospitals and health systems a space to collaborate, design, and develop the tools needed to address the common needs and challenges early adopters face as they implement new home hospital programs. 

The Accelerator is led by Dr. David Levine, a practicing general internist and investigator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, associate faculty at Ariadne Labs, and an internationally recognized leader in home hospital. He is the head of Ariadne’s Home Hospital initiative, which seeks to generate and disseminate the evidence to deliver advanced care at home so that patients can stay at home no matter their health concerns.

 In addition to the Accelerator program, the Home Hospital initiative is also conducting a randomized controlled trial of Rural Home Hospital. “We are excited to accelerate over 20 hospitals and systems on their path toward acute care at home and more broadly hope this will serve as a model for how hospitals can collaborate on care model development in the future,” said Levine.

“The Carolinas have an opportunity to be leaders in innovative home hospital strategies through this unique Accelerator program,” said Julia Wacker, executive director of CaroNova. “We have 14 hospitals participating from the Carolinas alone, and they are set to be examples for other states and regions. Our goal is to help health systems navigate this new and important territory to find creative solutions for delivering quality, acute care in a patient’s home when appropriate.” 

With pro bono support from Scrum Inc., the Accelerator uses the Scrum agile project management framework to nimbly create the tools, clinical protocols, and workflows needed to enable home hospital programs to provide acute hospital-level care away from a physical hospital. Over the course of the 40-week program, health care professionals from 21 hospitals and health systems will develop 20 of these knowledge products that they can implement in their own home hospital programs.

 The Accelerator had its launch meeting on September 9, 2021, with over 100 individuals representing the 21 hospitals and health systems from the United States and South Africa. The Accelerator’s first knowledge product – the core clinical inclusion and exclusion criteria for acute care at home – has already been designed as expected within the two-sprint sequence.

The hospitals and health systems participating in the Accelerator include:

The accelerator includes seven additional hospitals and health systems not listed.

About Ariadne Labs:
Ariadne Labs is a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With a mission to save lives and reduce suffering, our vision is that health systems equitably deliver the best possible care for every patient, everywhere, every time. We use human centered design, health systems implementation science, public health expertise, and frontline clinical care experience to design, test and spread scalable systems-level solutions to some of health care’s biggest problems. From developing checklists and conversation guides to fostering international collaborations and establishing global standards of measurement, our work has been accessed in more than 165 countries, touching hundreds of millions of lives. Visit ariadnelabs.org to learn more and covid19.ariadnelabs.org to learn about Ariadne Labs’ response to COVID-19.

Media Contact:
Brigid Tsai
Email: btsai@ariadnelabs.org


About CaroNova:
CaroNova is a bi-state team established through a partnership among The Duke Endowment, the North Carolina Healthcare Association, and the South Carolina Hospital Association. CaroNova engages with critical stakeholders to effect positive change in health across North and South Carolina. Acting as a connector of people and ideas for the two states, CaroNova addresses common areas of need by supporting promising new practices and developing business models to scale and sustain what works for systemic change. The name CaroNova translates to creating a new vision (Nova) of health for the Carolinas (Caro). Please visit CaroNova.org to learn more.

Media Contact:
Jill Armbruster
Email: jill@CaroNova.org