Beacon Christian Community Health Center (www.beaconcchc.com), in conjunction with personnel from South Korea and Europe, created a first-of-its-kind comprehensive outpatient protocol at the start of the height of COVID-19 cases in New York City.  The goal was to help reduce an overwhelming surge of patients in hospital emergency rooms and subsequent overwhelming of intensive care units, if possible, while also ministering to patients using a whole-person (physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual) approach.  The link to the paper is below:

 

An Approach to Outpatient Screening, Treatment, and Community Health Outreach during the Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City

• https://www.beacon360.org/resources/blog-post-title-four-eymxx

Since the publication of the paper, several updates at this time should be addressed:

 

1) There has been some promising recent research with remdesivir (Gilead Sciences), but since the medication can only be administered in hospitals, there is no use for it at this time in a widespread outpatient context.

2) While an initial study found hydroxychloroquine potentially helpful in treating COVID-19, subsequent studies have not been so promising.  In any case, in certain states (like New York), hydroxychloroquine was and still is not readily available to the outpatient provider community.

3) Since the writing of our paper, we have treated close to 100 people on this protocol.  As of this emailing, none have reached a level of severity requiring ER evaluation or hospitalization.

 

It must be noted that as of this date, there is still ongoing research into combatting COVID-19.  Again, our paper does not propose an ironclad solution to preventing COVID-19 from progressing in patients.  The paper simply attempts to describe what an integrated outpatient approach that incorporates diagnostic testing, treating, tracking and teaching (via community health education principles) can potentially do in an effort to prevent hospital surge related to coronavirus pandemic activity in a given population.  

 

More information about our protocols can be found on Beacon Christian Community Health Center’s new teaching website:  Beacon360.org

 

Please contact Dr. Janet Kim at janetk@beaconcchc.com for further questions related to this paper or the protocol implementation.  May God bless and guide those who read this paper.