Photo: Bryan Goodchild
A specially trained community paramedics program will be launched this fall to offer home evaluation and treatment 24/7 for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities living in Worcester County.
The program is a large-scale collaborative effort that includes the UMass Chan Medical School Departments of Emergency Medicine and Family Medicine & Community Health; the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center at UMass Chan; ForHealth Consulting at UMass Chan; the UMass Memorial Health Mobile Integrated Health program; the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services; and MassHealth.
The pilot program, Paramedic Acute Response Approach for Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (PARA-AIDD), is expected to impact up to 600 area residents in 13 communities, including Worcester. Its mission is to provide high quality care quickly to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities by providing treatment at home.
The initiative will study cost-effectiveness, emergency department avoidance, reduction in hospitalizations and quality of care. It aims to reduce emergency department visits and improve resource utilization, decrease time to treatments and provide a seamless experience following the mobile health visit to connect with outpatient providers.
“This is a population that is generally challenging to support in an emergency department, especially given the length of time that they would need to wait to see care,” said Emily Lauer, PhD, MPH, associate professor of family medicine & community health. “These patients might have many other care protocols that you need to be aware of to keep them safe, and that can be really hard to communicate accurately and clearly in an emergency department setting.”
Carmela Socolovsky, MD, MPH, medical director at MassHealth, said, “This program represents the best kind of innovation in care delivery, leveraging existing resources and technology to tailor care to patient needs, seeking to improve patient experience and outcomes while reducing costs.”
Laurel O’Connor, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine, and medical director of UMass Memorial’s Mobile Integrated Health program, said the Department of Emergency Medicine has designed specific mobile integrated health protocols for adults with intellectual development disabilities, and is providing extensive paramedic education on home evaluation and treatment. The emergency medicine faculty are responsible for all the clinical care for the pilot.
“We’ve been focusing on adapting our program for this population, developing protocols, educating the paramedics in these additional skill sets that they need,” Dr. O’Connor said. “We’ve also been putting together an implementation package for patients with IDD and their families, group homes and group home staff agencies, and primary care doctors, so they are all aware of what the program is, what it does, and how to use it, so they all can feel very comfortable with it when it launches.”
The paramedics being trained in the program are from Worcester EMS. They will be able to provide assessments, labs, imaging and some treatment options. UMass Chan medical students will also be involved in training and data analysis.
A triage phone line will be accessible to patients and their families when the pilot program launches in October. More information can be found at PARA-AIDD.com.
