Bridging health equity gaps: a clinician’s vision for Hospital at Home
One clinician shares her vision for leveraging home-based care to support unhoused patients and promote health equity.
The following brief video clip features Tuyet-Trinh (Trini) Truong, MD, associate professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Chief Medical Officer, Mount Sinai at Home. A Hosptial @ Home Leadership Summit Advisory board member, Truong speaks to health equity efforts through Hospital at Home.
This transcript has been edited for brevity.
Question: How can Hospital at Home support unhoused patients or those facing housing insecurity?
Answer: I think Hospital at Home could definitely be the bridge to health equity, particularly with our most challenged or disadvantage patients –– our unhoused patients. Some of the criteria we use right now to select patients in the program may be excluding this population. But from the pandemic, we learned that we can take care of patients in a lot of creative spaces, including tents in Central Park, in hotels, in other areas we didn't even think of before. So I think with Hospital at Home, our investment in this, and our ability to scale this –– we owe a particular focus to our unhoused population. Maybe we can't yet take care of these patients where they are currently living, but perhaps we could take care of them in other creative places, such as a supportive housing or hotels... And I think we can.
About Dr. Truong: As the chief medical officer for Mount Sinai at Home, Truong creates vision to deliver patient-centered quality care to patients in their homes. She has implemented strategies to launch, grow and integrate programs on the continuum of home-based care – Hospital at Home, Rehabilitation at Home, Palliative Care at Home and other home-care clinical services within the Mount Sinai at Home portfolio. She is passionate about addressing health equity and believes that home-based care, particularly acute at home care is well-positioned and is an important tool to advance health equity. Truong graduated from Swarthmore College in Economics and Biology, obtained her MD at Temple University Katz School of Medicine and completed her internal medicine residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Currently, she is an associate professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Mount Sinai.
Originally published by ICD Healthcare on Oct. 17, 2023.
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