Operation Decompress - Alaska's EMS MIH Emergency Response to the COVID-19 Hospital Crisis and Paramedic Legislation

Description: Alaska’s COVID-19 rates skyrocketed by September 2021, with hospitals across the state enacting crisis standards as the Delta variant crippled its healthcare system. The crisis began to impact everything from heart attacks to strokes to trauma care, nearly exhausting existing resources. With medical staff statewide reaching a breaking point, the state began examining innovative solutions, such as utilizing Mobile Integrated Healthcare as a means to either load level and or decompress regional hospitals within the state. prehospital assisted solutions which had never been attempted in the Great Land.
Paramedics Terry Kadel and Brian Webb both work for the Alaska Office of EMS (OEMS) and will walk down the mobile integrated healthcare (MIH) process the state employed to assist with not only decompression of its medical facilities, but the provision of home-based follow-up care and treatment of patients, and how it could reduce the impacts of healthcare costs of not only the patient, but the healthcare facilities as well. They will further discuss the implications of the recently enacted Alaska Senate Bill 21, and its impacts for the provision of primary care activities by paramedics in Alaska, and its relationship for future community paramedicine projects.