Liquid Hospital: when healthcare extends beyond the hospital

by Ana Díaz-Roncero, Oct 14, 2026

The Liquid Hospital is the concept that the hospital is no longer understood solely as a building, but also as a care capability that can be deployed beyond its physical walls.

Back in 2021, we were already talking about the Liquid Hospital as one of the models set to transform healthcare. At the time, the pandemic had accelerated telemedicine and remote patient monitoring, demonstrating that part of hospital care could continue beyond the hospital walls.

Today, Spanish healthcare policies are already addressing these types of solutions. The 2025–2028 Strategy for Addressing Chronicity in the Spanish National Health System promotes person-centred, proactive and integrated care, while highlighting the need to strengthen coordination across care settings and ensure continuity of care.

The Liquid Hospital encompasses different levels of care decentralisation: from replacing certain journeys with teleconsultations to delivering care at home that would otherwise require a hospital bed.

The reality is that there is no single international classification of the services that make up a Liquid Hospital. In this article, we propose nine areas to organise the main ways in which care can extend beyond the hospital:

1. 1. Hospital at Home (HaH). Brings hospital-level care into the home for patients with acute conditions or exacerbations of chronic disease. It is an alternative to conventional hospitalisation and requires maintaining the monitoring and clinical response capabilities of the hospital.
  2. Intermediate Care Hospital at Home. Sits between the acute episode and full discharge and is particularly focused on functional recovery and ensuring continuity of care, while avoiding admission to an intermediate care facility.
  3. Telecare. A primarily social care service that helps identify needs or risk situations and activate a coordinated response involving the available services and the person’s support network.
  4. Integrated health and social care. Coordinates healthcare and social care for people who require long-term follow-up or have complex needs, both at home and in residential care settings.
  5. Teleconsultation. Enables interactions between patients and healthcare professionals, or between different healthcare professionals, to take place remotely, avoiding unnecessary travel when face-to-face care is not required.
  6. Remote triage. Uses remote assessment and triage tools to determine the most appropriate response to a potentially urgent situation.
  7. Day hospital at home. Brings procedures usually carried out in a day hospital into the home when clinical, organisational and safety conditions allow.
  8. Telerehabilitation. Supports the continuity and supervision of functional recovery programmes outside the healthcare setting through professional follow-up and digital tools.
  9. Telepharmacy. Extends pharmaceutical care into the home, supporting continuity of treatment and ongoing follow-up.
  Five years after our first article on Liquid Hospitals, the question is no longer whether healthcare can extend beyond the hospital walls. The challenge is to ensure that this extension is safe, coordinated and sustainable, while giving healthcare professionals access to useful information to support decision-making.
  
  At Persei vivarium, we are working in this direction by developing Digital Health solutions designed to provide healthcare professionals with information generated outside the hospital, support remote patient monitoring and turn data into useful insights.
  
  Because the Liquid Hospital is not about making the physical hospital disappear. It is about enhancing its care capabilities through technology, so that care can accompany patients wherever they need it.