Depending on how you count them, it was during the second or third surge of COVID-19 patients when the COVID Accelerated Care Pathway (CACP) launched on Dec. 14, 2020 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). Amid nationwide concerns about increasing strains on hospital capacity, this was a program designed to streamline care for patients who were sick enough to require hospitalization for COVID-19 but could be safely discharged to recover at home after being initially stabilized at the hospital.
In an analysis published this month, the CACP was found to be highly effective in safely reducing hospital length of stay, a coveted metric during the worst of COVID-19. And it was all only possible once the health system took a step back to evaluate a problem that quietly developed under the umbrella of the pandemic.
The researchers who conducted the analysis. Austin Kilaru, an assistant professor emergency physician, M. Kit Delgado, an assistant professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology, and Kathleen Lee, former director of Innovation in emergency medicine, are the three researchers to analyze the data.
The analysis shows that short hospitalizations were often unavoidable, but it might be possible to expedite the discharge for patients who could continue to recover at home, with some additional clinical support from the health system.
When CACP launched, key work had already been done by Keith Hemmert, the medical director of HUP’s emergency department. Hemmert and his team developed an algorithm to identify patients coming into the emergency department who had medium-severity illness—such as blood oxygen levels being low but not severely low—due to COVID-19, which was useful for identifying candidates for the program.
“Identifying these patients early in their encounter with the health system allowed us to set them on a trajectory toward early discharge to home, and meanwhile allowed us to prioritize the right resources for patients who were seriously ill with COVID-19,” Hemmert says.
Read more at Penn Medicine News.
