Home health care, e-health, and telemedicine policies in selected middle and high-income countries: a rapid policy review

Home health care (HHC) is the provision and delivery of health care services where patients live. In this work, with the Philippines as an exemplar for lower-middle income countries in a similar situation (young-skewing demographics, fragmented health care system, and nascent HHC sector), we review policies regarding HHC services, telehealth, and e-Health in the Philippines and seven other jurisdictions (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, EU, Malaysia, and Thailand), identify specific “best-practice” policies covering aspects such as service delivery, personnel training, financing and governance, and analyze their feasibility of adoption in the Philippines. Barriers to access to quality HHC by patients in the analyzed jurisdictions remain, precluding naive efforts to copy these policies verbatim to the Philippine setting. Finally, we sketch out a timeline for the implementation of HHC efforts in the Philippines, which, due to the local political landscape, needs to be strongly legislation-based.