Highlights:
Prevention. We are leveraging our existing population health skill set to focus on COVID prevention:
- Outreach to high-risk patients. We have used a registry-based approach to contact and provide counseling to at-risk patients, in addition to making sure their other health needs are met.
- Department of Public Health partnerships. CHA has partnered with multiple local public health departments to provide widespread COVID testing.
- Preventive care for non-COVID disease. We continue to provide access to patients for preventive care needs, such as early childhood vaccinations.
Primary Care. We have maintained our commitment to Primary Care throughout the pandemic. To serve patients’ unique needs and protect patients and staff during the pandemic, we radically overhauled our primary care model:
- Televisits. CHA has implemented a new telemedicine model for acute and chronic care. Televisits are also available for most medical and surgical specialties and outpatient psychiatry.
- In-person Visits. In-person visits are available after a symptom screening at two regional clinics, or at our dedicated Respiratory Clinic for patients with COVID or COVID-like symptoms.
COVID Care. We developed a centralized model of COVID care embedded in our Primary Care network.
- COVID Triage Center. We created a dedicated call center staffed by nurses and doctors seven days a week to address the needs of patients with symptoms of COVID or questions or concerns related to COVID.
- Respiratory Clinic. The Respiratory Clinic provides acute and chronic in-person care for patients with COVID or COVID-like symptoms.
- Community Management. Patients with suspected or confirmed COVID and at higher risk of serious disease are followed by a group of Community Management providers throughout their illness.
To accomplish these tasks, we developed many new protocols, workflows, and guidelines, which are available to the public and to interested medical practitioners below.