Transforming home-based primary care through mHealth integration: associations with efficiency and acute care utilisation

Objective The objective of this study is to evaluate the real-world associations between implementation of the CareHub mHealth platform and operational efficiency, service delivery and acute care utilisation in a physician-led home-based primary care (HBPC) clinic. Methods We conducted a single-centre, retrospective pre–post observational study at an HBPC clinic in Republic of Korea. The preintervention period used paper charts and manual digital tools, while the postintervention period used CareHub for all clinical and administrative workflows. Eligible patients were aged 65 years or older with limited mobility who had requested at least one physician home visit. All 158 patients received visits in both observation periods, yielding a complete paired dataset. For analysis, Poisson regression with log (patient-months) offset was used. Results CareHub implementation was associated with significant improvements in operational efficiency. Mean documentation time decreased by 85.45% and provider productivity increased by 24.04%. Service utilisation rose by 51.85%, reflecting greater visit frequency among high-risk patients. Acute care utilisation also decreased: emergency department visits fell by 45.90% and hospitalisations by 60.97%. Discussion Integrating a provider-facing mHealth platform into physician-led HBPC was associated with substantial improvements in operational efficiency and reductions in acute care utilisation. By decreasing administrative burden, CareHub enabled more proactive, frequent home visits for high-risk patients, which may explain observed declines in emergency department visits and hospitalisations. Conclusions An integrated mHealth platform can be associated with substantially reducing administrative burden, increasing provider productivity and supporting more proactive HBPC, which may contribute to meaningful reductions in acute care utilisation. In the Republic of Korea’s physician-led HBPC model, CareHub may represent essential digital infrastructure for sustaining and scaling home-based care.