A five-year, 887-patient study finds high satisfaction with telemedicine-based hospital-at-home care, but does not measure whether it saves clinical resource

A retrospective observational cohort study of 887 adult patients admitted to a virtual-first hospital-at-home programme at a tertiary hospital in Madrid, Spain, between October 2020 and May 2025, found overall satisfaction of 96.5%, perceived safety reported by 98.98% of patients, and 97.06% finding telemedicine easy to integrate into daily life Audit/Data (Mir Montero et al.1).

The study measures patient-reported experience and satisfaction at a single tertiary hospital; it does not report clinical outcomes such as readmission or mortality, nor does it measure the clinical workforce time or cost associated with delivering the programme, so it answers whether patients will accept virtual-first hospital-at-home care, not whether the model is workforce- or resource-neutral to deliver.

For services planning telemedicine-based hospital-at-home care, this is strong evidence that patients accept and value the model; whether it can be delivered without an offsetting increase in clinical staff time is a separate question this study does not address.