The Home Hospital program has named Ana Luisa Neves, MD, PhD, as the second Home Hospital International Fellow. The Fellowship offers home hospital researchers and clinicians an opportunity to join the Ariadne Labs community to conduct research, share experiences, build new partnerships, and actively advise and mentor students and new scholars in the field.
Dr. Neves is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in Digital Health at the Imperial College of London, and Director of the College’s Global Digital Health Unit (GDHU), a research hub for innovation and entrepreneurship in health care. She leads a team conducting research in digital health, with a focus on the use of digital technologies to deliver safer, more effective, and patient-centered care. She has more than 15 years of research experience and has worked as a medical doctor in both high- and low-income countries.
We spoke with Dr. Neves to discuss what excites her about home hospital care, the role of digital technology in improving the patient experience, and what she hopes to learn from her fellowship.
Where did your interest in home hospital start?
I’m a General Practitioner by background, and for the last five or six years I’ve been focused on research in digital innovation, trying to understand what the current challenges are in our health care systems and where technology may offer a possible solution. A lot of my work has been focused on co-designing, implementing, and evaluating digital innovations in health care systems.
In the last two years, an important part of my program of work has focused on the role and applications of remote care and virtual consultations. We launched a few international projects studying how virtual consultations impacted the way people were delivering care, the experience of care during the pandemic and, importantly, what lessons were there that people want to take forward. As part of my previous role, I was also involved in a national study evaluating the safety of remote monitoring of patients with COVID-19 during the pandemic.
Last year I joined the Harvard Global Healthcare Leaders program, and heard Dr. Levine (Director of Ariadne Labs’ Home Hospital Program) present on home hospital, and there was a lot of overlap with my research interests.
Why did you apply for the fellowship?
I’m passionate about global health, and I’ve always been keen to learn more about how different people do different things in different health systems around the world. What can we learn from each other? How can we grow and advance together? I have experience with virtual care and remote monitoring in European contexts, but the U.S. is a completely different health care system with a completely different structure.
What is most exciting to you about how technology can be applied to improve care?
One piece of it is health inequity, and how we make sure that the delivery of innovation in health care reduces, rather than aggravates, existing disparities.
Another angle is how technology can improve timeliness of care for conditions that aren’t severe but still cause a lot of discomfort for people. It would be really convenient and improve their quality of life if we could use technology to give people a quicker answer and get them treated sooner.
So, I’m quite interested in how technology can improve timeliness of care, equity of care, and ultimately reaching out to people living in remote areas or underserved groups. At the same time though, we need to be very conscious around the safety of these interventions. We’re all very excited about it and want to jump in, but we also need to have structured approaches to evaluate its implications for quality and safety of care as we move forward.
What are you hoping to gain through the fellowship?
Most of my work to this point has been in a European context and I’ve always felt really curious about how the health care system in the U.S. operates and how the research culture operates. I wanted to challenge myself in a new setting and gain experience in a different health care system, with a different way of delivering research. And I’m seeing the differences in research already in the way the team at Ariadne Labs delivers the work, and their agile, flexible, user-centric approaches.
What excites you most for the future of home hospital?
I think the rural home hospital work is one of the most exciting sides of it, and digital equity is a big piece of that. Whenever there’s a new technology, a big concern is that we know it will be picked up by those who are most literate, those who have a higher socioeconomic standing. So in this way technology can further entrench existing inequities by delivering a product that benefits those who don’t really need it as much. So I’m excited to dive in to see how technology, rather than entrenching these inequities, can be a tool to lessen inequities and get care to those who really need it.