Expert Discusses Home Treatment for Aggressive Lymphomas Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic

Stephen Schuster, MD, explained how Penn Medicine is utilizing at-home treatments, which will continue after the pandemic, to maximize safety and reduce hospital traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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We’ve also set up to do many of our treatments at home that we used to hospitalize patients for. For example, patients that require infusional chemotherapy, not bolus, like R-EPOCH, we now do it at home. We have all the SOPs working fine and have not had any unforeseen or adverse events occur in the home setting, and patients seem to like it. I think the silver lining in all of this is that as we begin to open up again, we’re probably going to maintain a lot of the procedures that we’ve implemented. For example, in terms of cleaning and trying to stagger patients, I think this has been a learning experience. We’ve done very well without observing any complications. So, I think that we’ll continue to maintain-I mean it’ll just be as important during flu season, etc. to try to stagger visits, do extra cleaning, and then to treat patients at home. The ability to do televisits is very convenient for patients when they don’t actually have to be examined, or they’re not having a problem where it’s a routine follow up, touching bases, review labs, reviewing images with the patients. It’s a great way to do it. Now that we have the technology up and running, I don’t think it’s going to disappear.