What the administration of infusions of my father’s house for 10 years taught me to improve chronic disease care

During my years as an infirmer, I saw my father in patients with chronic disease who regularly passed our doors. Like them, he spent decades suffering from emergency conditions that could have been prevented with appropriate and coherent care. But unlike them, his ER visits finally slowed down, then stopped completely. Not because of a miracle remedy, but because he had had me: a reliable and qualified nurse performing her vital infusions at home – in time, each time.

It has become clear to me that if my father’s life could be considerably improved with routine care at home, many others could also. The solution seemed simple, but as I would soon learn, the infusion of the road to the house is riddled with administrative obstacles, endowment challenges and communication barriers – of the solved problems that we have long been expected to note as an industrial.

My father received a diagnosis of variable immune deficiency (CVVI) in 1979 after a painful stay in the USI who let the doctors wonder if he would survive. Despite being an elite runner and previously more skin, missing infusions meant that his immune system would be a tenth as effective as that of a normal person, attaching his survival to medical facilities and his moldings in nursing.

Every six weeks in the 1980s, my father and a family member took a full day, led 30 minutes for a hospital, paid parking, awaited an available chair, supported the infusion, awaited outing documents again and finally go home. My enlarged family regularly gave plasma for these first infusions, but even after pharmaceutical companies began to pool plasma donations and the manufacture of antibody infusions (IG), these days of the hospital drained the energy, well-being and even my father’s health.

The quality of care was just as problematic. On numerous occasions, nurses with inadequate technical skills stuck 6 to 8 times without success, requiring rescue nurses and reprogramming, which meant missed treatments, days of illness and increased vulnerability to infections. This model continued for years: sub-optimal care leading to sub-optimal health results.

The turning point came when I, now an authorized nurse, returns home. Suddenly, my father had access to something that should have been standard always: a qualified and reliable nurse (although her son) who could administer her treatments at home, on time, each time.

The transformation was immediate and deep. Rather than receiving treatments every six weeks, he could now get them every two weeks, which maintained his more stable immune level. The more frequent and smaller doses have considerably reduced its post-infusion fatigue. Instead of fighting 2-3 days of discomfort after each mega-dose, he now needed a brief nap before returning to full energy.

During my emergency career, I accumulated an editing epiphany: the inconsistent care model of my decadent father on the decades triggering acute episodes was not unique. It is in fact well understood among professionals in emergency medicine that the high volume of visits to patients chronic disease consumes most hospital capacities and makes the management of emerging patients more difficult, but nobody knew how to break the cycle. Now, as a founder of a health technology company, I know that this disconnection lights up a high -level dead angle in the way we approach home infusion and other technical medical services.

The traditional approach was to bring the nurses back to home, often with a different skills foundation, and to have them carried out occasionally technical procedures that they could do that intermittent. It is like asking someone who generally operates a large platform to operate a commercial plane once a month and expect the same level of competence as a full-time pilot.

The best approach, which changed the course of my father’s life, reversed this model: bringing highly qualified hospital nurses with thousands of hours of technical experience in the home. These practitioners have developed the level of mastery of the “10,000 hours” that Malcolm Gladwell described – they have placed countless IV, monitored complex drugs and managed unexpected complications as part of their daily work.

There is another critical element here: the landscape of available drugs is constantly evolving. New drugs, surveillance guidelines and secondary effect profiles emerge regularly. Clinicians who specialize in infusion therapy are more likely to stay up to date with these changes, offering an additional layer of safety and efficiency.

The nurses who had trouble administering my father’s treatments were not insensitive; They simply lacked the specialized experience necessary for constant success with technically demanding procedures. When treatments are administered by specialists who perform these tasks daily, patient experience improves considerably and health results follow.

The future of chronic disease care must recognize this fundamental truth: all nursing skills are not interchangeable. Home health and home infusion require different specialties and must be treated as such. You can bring a nurse to the hospital in a home setting and obtain excellent results, but take a home health nurse whose main objective has been on safety and general care assessments, and expect technical skills with complex infusions, often leads to sub-optimal results.

This awareness is part of a broader undressing of hospital services which is starting to transform health care. While we are developing better systems to deploy clinical talents specialized in home environments, we can move more and more complex care outside the facilities and in people’s houses, where treatment is often more comfortable, practical and profitable.

Technology will speed up this transformation. With robust data and well -defined use cases, AI can help identify models, predict complications, optimize planning and perform other support functions that make home care more effective and effective.

As we sail on these changes, we have to remember my father’s experience and the experiences of millions of people like him. The next border of health care does not only concern new drugs or diagnostic tools; It is a question of reinventing how and where we deploy our existing clinical expertise. For patients with chronic diseases, this distinction is the difference between prosperous and simply surviving.

Organic author:

Ryan Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Float, a health technology company that reduces the operational costs of pharmacies, connects nurses to the possibilities of working at home and offers quality care to patients with chronic disease.

Photo: Boonchai Wedmakawand, Getty Images