Two of the main areas where health system spending is very high are hospital admissions and readmissions and emergency department visits and bounce backs. Readmissions occur when a patient is discharged from the hospital but returns to the hospital for the same care concern within thirty days. A bounce back is when a patient is released from the emergency department or acute care clinic and returns to the emergency department or acute care clinic for the same health concern within thirty days

Another important cost concern is the use of the emergency room for non acute health conditions. This happens because lack of access to doctors because of full schedules or late hour needs. In the shift towards value based care, it is not as easy for a provider to advise patients to go to the emergency room for non acute conditions. Recent studies have concluded that, if health plans, providers, and policy makers want to find a method to treat non urgent conditions in a setting other than the emergency room, they need to use evidence based interventions that address the individual health needs of the patients. DispatchHealth is a proven and evidence based intervention to treat non urgent patients in the home.

This document describes the Denver, Colorado based DispatchHealth based on interviews with the founders, who are veteran healthcare leaders. It gives more detail on a clinical delivery model of convenient, accessible, patient centered acute care.