The HHS’s mission is to contribute to patients’ health, comfort, and well-being, as well as that of their families, in cases when patients are unable to be cared for in the CCC. It provides hospital-level home care services whenever possible.

The HHS team, together with medical officers, defines and proposes an personalised therapeutic plan in order to allow the patient to receive the necessary health care without leaving his or her home. In accordance with the plan, the necessary means for the best follow-up of the patient, and the necessary equipment and technical support are provided.

The Service develops its care-providing activity essentially at the level of palliative care and the symptomatic control of pain or existing comorbidities.

On the side of continuous postoperative care, the Service works to promote the patients’ functional recovery and autonomy. Since the opening of the Surgical Centre and the Hospitalisation Unit, the CCC has fostered a close collaboration between their respective teams and the Home Hospitalisation Service. This enables the personalised planning of the hospitalisation period for each patient, distributed between the CCC facilities and the transfer to the home in a home-care regime, until the medical and surgical teams clinically discharge the patient.

In 2016 the CCC developed an innovative data transmission technology project in order to offer clinical care at home and to ensure its remote monitoring. It allows for the collection, at home and in real-time, of the biological parameters and vital signs of the patient, and visual interaction with the Hospitalisation Unit support team.

This project, called “The Hospital of the Future”, developed and created the first Home Hospitalisation Robot through a collaboration with Philips and Portugal Telecom, partners of reference in the fields of clinical systems and telecommunications.

The robot has functionalities such as high-quality sound and image video-calling to communicate with the patient, real-time monitoring of vital signs, remotely-managed drug dispensing, and a system that sends alerts and messages to the patients.

It is totally autonomous: there is no need to install any type of communication infrastructure at the patient’s house. Completely conceived at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, the Robot, an essential support tool for the Home Hospitalisation Unit, thus provides a greater level of autonomy to the patients in their usual living environment, reducing hospitalisation periods and humanising the convalescence and continuous care periods.