Home Care Delivery for Patients Undergoing HSCT During COVID-19

Nelson J. Chao, MD, professor of Medicine, Donald D. and Elizabeth G. Cooke Cancer Distinguished Research Professor, professor of Immunology, research professor of Global Health, professor of Pathology, and chief of the Division of Cell Therapy in the Department of Medicine at Duke Cancer Institute discusses a shift from in-office care to home care in patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) for hematologic malignancies.

The shift to home-based encounters was a multidisciplinary team effort to deliver safe patient care with HSCT and test the future capabilities of administering cancer therapy at home.

Transcription:

0:08 | So we, we have been running a randomized study, randomizing patients to be transplanted at home versus, in the clinic. And last year when the first COVID search hit, we decided to move everybody to home. So, it was primarily the nurses that did this, managed to actually get patients out of the clinic, and then we would go into the patient's home to take care of them. And that worked quite well. We've been pretty successful in keeping patients out of the hospital since they don't have to be anywhere near the health care system, you know, back a year, over a year ago, we had very little knowledge of what those were going to be like. So, it was a lesson that we learned how to take care of patients outside the hospital.

1:15 | It was mainly around the fact that we could do it. We didn't have to bring patients in the hospital. Patients could stay at home. We would take antibiotics and blood, and things like that to the patient. So, it was feasible. It was beneficial for the patients, and we didn't have many re-hospitalizations and certainly didn't have any COVID cases.