In March, thirty-three-year-old Doctors for Bernie cofounder Uma Tadepalli moved home to Durham, North Carolina to practice a model of medicine she’d learned in San Francisco. The model, called Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), “was born in the Cantonese-speaking Chinese community there in the seventies,” she says. “They were seeing older adults in their community failing to thrive in nursing homes, and they thought, ‘There’s gotta be another way.’”

Under the PACE model, older adults live at home with their families and in their communities, but each day they’re transported to a day center where their health needs are also met by medical professionals, from doctors and nurses to physical therapists to recreational therapists. They have all their meals on-site, as well as wraparound services from pharmacy to nutrition. Plus, it’s a social experience, Tadepalli says, “like camp or school.”

Tadepalli is full of enthusiasm for PACE. “Every older adult has a village supporting them,” she says, and “it’s this kind of beautiful, democratic way decisions get made” between patients and an interdisciplinary team of providers. The cherry on top is that PACE is publicly financed through Medicare and Medicaid. She was excited to put it into practice back home in North Carolina. But the timing of Tadepalli’s move couldn’t have been worse. Almost as soon as she arrived in Durham, the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing.