KP Physician Leader Describes ‘Found Work Force’ Approach to Enable Surge Standard of Care

In preparing for the coming surge of patients, Kaiser Permanente hospitals are working to shift physicians and nurses and to use telehealth in new ways to make up for the expected shortage of intensivists.

Speaking during a March 24 webinar put on by the Commonwealth Fund, Stephen Parodi, M.D., executive vice president of the Permanente Medical Group, said Kaiser is looking at providing specialty telemedicine. “There are not going to be enough intensivists to do business as usual,” he said. “But we do have intensivists who can use their knowledge to provide that to hospitalists, where we have a larger work force, to provide the critical care at different ratios than what we are used to doing in the United States.”

He said they would look to back-fill for the hospitalists who are going to be doing critical care with physicians capable of providing the subspecialty or internal medicine care for the regular hospitalized patients. “Right now, they are not doing outpatient care because they are doing telehealth. We have a bunch of surgeons in ambulatory surgery units who are not doing surgery because we have ended elective surgery, so we can repurpose those individuals.”