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Published On May 3, 2014
CLINICAL CARE
Defined: Community Paramedicine
A new approach to in-home care turns to EMS providers.
community paramedicine: a trend that repurposes emergency medical services to provide in-home chronic disease management and follow-up care
Paramedics traditionally respond to emergencies, stabilize patients and rush them to hospitals, but a new approach to providing care could have EMS responders thinking long term: Community paramedicine programs use emergency medical personnel to provide in-home care. “Paramedics are taught to think about the next 30 minutes,” says Gary Wingrove, director of Government Relations and Strategic Affairs at Gold Cross/Mayo Clinic Medical Transport, “but now they need to think about the next 30 days.”
One advantage of an in-home visit is that it lets care providers take stock of patients’ living environments, says Douglas Kupas, the associate chief academic officer for simulation and medical education at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa. They might suggest improvements, such as reconciling a patient’s planned drug regimen with what the patient is actually taking, or working with a building manager to move a patient with heart disease from the fourth floor of a walk-up apartment building to the first.
Already, there are more than 230 community paramedicine programs in the United States, with more than 560 in development.
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One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

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