Stephen Parodi, MD, on MedPage Today: Pandemic supercharged acute-care transformation

Stephen Parodi, MD, associate executive director for The Permanente Medical Group, wrote recently on MedPage Today about how the COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked a transformation in acute care by bringing more hospital-level care into patients’ homes.

“Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, remote care tools laid the groundwork for deploying hospital-level care at home,” wrote Dr. Parodi, who also serves as executive vice president at The Permanente Federation. “As COVID-19 patients filled hospital floors, demand accelerated for alternative acute care venues.” The pandemic, he added, “effectively supercharged a transformation that could dramatically improve health care accessibility, quality, convenience, and patient satisfaction while reducing costs.”

Many organizations, including Kaiser Permanente, have since stepped up plans to bring hospital-level care into the home. A typical program may include a physician-led command center with remote patient monitoring, in-person response team visits and the delivery of medicines and supplies to patient homes, and a logistics platform with built-in redundancies to ensure patient safety. New digital tools and services enable patients to communicate with their care team and allow the team to respond rapidly, Dr. Parodi wrote.

Regulatory flexibilities implemented during the COVID-19 health care emergency enabled the delivery of hospital-level care at home, he wrote. However, those flexibilities are due to expire when the public health care emergency ends.

To continue delivery of virtual services at home, Dr. Parodi wrote, “requires a regulatory framework that allows us to codify these new systems so we can continue to provide acute care at home.”

To read the entire opinion piece, visit MedPage Today.