Pandemic pivot: Volunteers' friendly telephone calls to community dwelling older adults to foster re-engagement with PCPS

Background: During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, many older patients were isolated at home and fearful of returning to physicians' offices Volunteers from our modified Hospital Elder Life Program - Empowering Elder Novel Interventions (ERNI), were redeployed to create a socially supportive telephone calls program in an effort to re-engage patients with their primary care physicians (PCP) Methods: We assigned trained ERNI volunteers to call patients 75 years and older from one NYU medical practice, and screened patients for interest in participating in a friendly telephone calls program From 6/1/20 to 10/15/20, volunteers reached 716 of 2,350 patients, 212 of whom opted in to have regular calls from volunteers (Intervention) Another 212 (not yet contacted) patients were selected for comparison (Control) by choosing every sixth patient by alphabetically listed last name We reviewed electronic medical records for patient encounters with PCPs and subspecialists dated after the first phone call, and to identify those with no appointments Results: Overall mean age was 82 (standard deviation (SD): 5 5);intervention-group mean age 82 4 (SD: 5 6) versus 81 7 for controls 64% of all patients were female, (intervention 70% versus 56% for controls) In the intervention group, 146 (69%) had at least one PCP follow up as compared to only 95 (45%) of those in the control group (p<0 01) Intervention-group patients visited subspecialty clinics more often as well (142 (67%) compared to 102 (48%);p<0 01) Out of the intervention group, 35 (17%) had neither PCP nor subspecialty clinic visits compared to 81 (38%) in the control-group (p<0 01) Conclusions: Older adults who received telephone calls from our volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly more likely to then have PCP and subspecialty visits compared to the control group The degree to which this led to greater use of health services for care that would be deemed necessary and missed opportunities among those who were not called requires further study