The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has necessitated drastic changes across the spectrum of health care, all of which have occurred with unprecedented rapidity. The need to accommodate change on such a large scale has required ingenuity and decisive thinking. The field of physical medicine and rehabilitation has been faced with many of these challenges. Healthcare practitioners in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, were among the first to encounter many of these challenges. One of the largest lessons included learning how to streamline admissions and transfer process into an acute rehabilitation hospital as part of a concerted effort to make acute care hospital beds available as quickly as possible.
Disclosure
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has resulted in rapid modifications in the delivery of healthcare. Key among them has been surge preparation to increase both acute care hospital availability and staffing, while utilizing state and federal waivers to provide appropriate and efficient delivery of care. As a large health system in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, we were faced with these challenges early on, including the need to rapidly transition patients from acute care beds in order to provide bed capacity for the acute care hospitals. Rehabilitation Medicine has always played an essential role in the continuum of care, establishing functional goals while identifying patients for post-acute care planning. During this crisis, this expertise, and the overwhelming need to adapt and facilitate patient transitions, resulted in a collaborative process to efficiently assess patients for post-acute care needs. We worked closely with our skilled nursing facility, home care partners, and an acute inpatient rehabilitation hospital to adapt their admissions processes to the COVID-19 patient population, all the while grappling with varying access to vital supplies, testing and manpower. As the patient criteria were established, rapid pathways were created to post-acute care, and we were able to create much needed bed capacity in our acute care hospitals.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.