Brain, 58, was treated in intensive care for a severe case. As soon as his condition had stabilized, he was sent home with equipment including a phone and a blood pressure monitor.
"Every day I would input my vital signs on the app," Brain said. "If anything went wrong or wasn't right, a nurse would call me straight away."
Brain spent six weeks on this "virtual ward (病房)", run by his local NHS hospital in partnership with Doccla, a healthcare technology company. He is one of thousands of patients to have been treated in new "hospitals at home", seen by NHS leaders as a "lifeline" for overwhelmed hospitals that have run out of beds. 2,500 virtual ward beds were already in use, ensuring that people could "get the care they need from their own homes".
Retz, founder of Docile, said soon there could be "regional command centers", where a doctor or nurse monitored data from hundreds of patients displayed on a dashboard. "It works in a similar way to traditional ward rounds in a hospital, with patients submitting data once or twice a day, which is reviewed by a doctor," he said.
Noel O'Kelly, clinical director at Spirit Health, said, "Older people want to spend as little time in hospital as possible and avoid hospital visits, particularly as frequent visits and long periods of time spent in hospital can be damaging to the health of older patients. We have already seen very encouraging results from the use of virtual wards for older patients."
Virtual wards allow real potential to support people to recover well in the community. The model is not a silver bullet and health leaders are mindful that it should not worsen health inequalities, but it could present a vital lifeline for the system.