In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems implemented programmes to manage outpatients with COVID-19. The goal was to expedite patients’ referral to acute care and prevent overcrowding of medical centres. We sought to evaluate the impact of such a programme, the COVID-19 Home Care Team (CHCT) programme.
Retrospective cohort.
Kaiser Permanente Northern California.
Adult members before COVID-19 vaccine availability (1 February 2020–31 January 2021) with positive SARS-CoV-2 tests.
Virtual programme to track and treat patients with ‘CHCT programme’.
The outcomes were (1) COVID-19-related emergency department visit, (2) COVID-19-related hospitalisation and (3) inpatient mortality or 30-day hospice referral.
We estimated the average effect comparing patients who were and were not treated by CHCT. We estimated propensity scores using an ensemble super learner (random forest, XGBoost, generalised additive model and multivariate adaptive regression splines) and augmented inverse probability weighting.
There were 98 585 patients with COVID-19. The majority were followed by CHCT (n=80 067, 81.2%). Patients followed by CHCT were older (mean age 43.9 vs 41.6 years, p
Despite CHCT following older patients with higher comorbidity burden, there appeared to be a protective effect. Patients followed by CHCT were more likely to present to acute care and less likely to die inpatient.