Yahya F, Cooper M, Saif W, Kassem M, Nazar H Development of a Hospital at Home Digital Twin for Patients With Frailty: Scoping Review Journal of Medical Internet Research 2025;0:e0 URL: https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e81510 doi: 10.2196/81510
What’s this about?
How can we make the most of advanced technology and live information to improve how we deliver hospital-level care at home?
What’s this about?
How can we make the most of advanced technology and live information to improve how we deliver hospital-level care at home?
Why are we looking at this?
The NHS 10-year plan wants to:
- Move more care from hospitals closer to home
- Prevent illness instead of just treating it
- Use more digital tools to support care
What is the work we are doing?
We explore all three by using something called Digital Twins. A Digital Twin is like a live virtual simulation of a patient and their surroundings using real-time information. It can help healthcare professionals predict problems early, to give care that’s safer and more personalised.
Learning from, and working with other experts, our work looked at creating a simple step-by-step model, which can be used to develop a Hospital-at-Home Digital Twin. This review was based on existing evidence for tools to support this, for patients living at home with frailty.
What does this mean?
- Technology and real-time data can help health professionals care for patients at home more efficiently.
- Digital Twins could make care timelier, safer, and tailored to each person.
- We’ve outlined the main building blocks for creating a Hospital at Home Digital Twin.
This work is just the beginning, but it shows how technology could possibly change the world of healthcare and what needs to be worked on to make this possible.
For those that want to know more:
Our article reviews the current evidence for tools that exist to support the development of a Hospital at Home Digital Twin. We describe the 5 layers required to build a Digital Twin. Results show that a variety of technologies exist to pick up information, such as wearables. However more understanding is needed of how we manage that data, store it, translate it and use it to make useful predictions to help staff who are looking after us make decisions. This article also talks about some of the challenges and opportunities we may face when using these technologies in our current healthcare system.