What is Home Hospitalization?
Home Hospitalization (HH), also known as hospital-at-home, home-based hospital care, or hospital in the home, is a service offered by hospitals for patients with acute illnesses. It provides hospital-level treatment at home, ensuring the necessary differentiation, complexity and intensity of care.
There are two main models for HH services: admission avoidance and early supported discharge.
- Admission avoidance applies to patients who can receive effective treatment at home, completely bypassing admission in conventional hospital services.
- Early supported discharge is suited for clinically stable patients who can safely finish their recovery process at home.
What are the benefits of Home Hospitalization?
HH literature describes the many benefits of this service such as improved psychological well-being, treatment near family, fewer hospital-acquired infections, faster recovery, reduced mortality, reduced readmission rate, high satisfaction levels, shorter length of stay, cost savings and increased hospital capacity.
Portuguese Context
In Portugal, HH was first introduced in 2015 at Garcia D’Orta Hospital in Almada. Since then there has been sustained national expansion, with more than 59 000 patients having received HH care. According to data from November 2025, the HH capacity in Portugal was 419 simultaneous patients, with an average length of stay (LOS) of 9 days.
HH management challenges
Despite its demonstrated benefits, HH introduces significant managerial complexity, including demand prediction, service capacity definition, human resource management, routing and scheduling of patient visits, while maintaining strong integration with conventional hospital services.
Addressing this level of complexity requires the use of robust decision support tools capable of supporting efficient, timely and cost-effective delivery. However, comprehensive decision support frameworks tailored to HH remain scarce in the literature and largely absent in practice. This gap provides the central motivation for the SUPPORT-HH project.