SavaSeniorCare was able to successfully recover more than 1,000 residents with COVID-19 after teaming up with a physician group to launch a pilot program at about a dozen facilities when the pandemic first hit. Now, the company is expanding the program to help other facilities manage the disease and prevent future outbreaks.
president and CXO of SavaSeniorCare
“I don’t know how you go through a pandemic like this without medical services, oversight and guidance, because they have a very different level of training, a significantly different level of training than our nursing staff does,” said Annaliese Impink, executive vice president and CXO of SavaSeniorCare.
“I think we would have struggled without them,” she told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
COVID-19 specialists
The Atlanta-based company, which currently operates 169 facilities across the United States, began working with the Geriatric Administrative Provider Services (GAPs) physician group in May to help treat COVID-19 residents. Sava quickly identified about a dozen designated centers that were taking COVID admissions for the pilot program.
The GAPs physicians acted as “COVIDists,” or COVID-19 specialists, working alongside medical directors at each facility over a period of eight weeks. The physicians would conduct virtual rounds multiple times a week.
They monitored negative residents to ensure they didn’t contract the disease, managed the treatment of positive residents and conducted widespread surveillance of all residents to prevent facilitywide outbreaks.
The physicians also conducted training with staff about properly wearing and disposing personal protective equipment and reviewed its company guidance and policies on COVID-19.
“I would say because of their tracking and surveillance and really bringing a much more focused eye, we had a lot of success in recovering our patients,” Impink said.
Learning experience
Physicians had more than 3,400 encounters with residents, helping recover more than 1,000 COVID-positive patients, according to Sava. Impink specifically noted that one of its centers in Connecticut had more than 90 positive residents and was able to recover about 94% of them through the program.
Overall, nine facilities out of the original group had graduated from the program and were COVID-free by the end of the eight weeks. Impink added that since then, just two facilities overall have experienced recurrences in cases.
“They learned a lot from these GAPs physicians. One of the things that we struggled with early on was just learning how to wear your PPE and just really understanding that. One of the benefits is they had that expertise,” she said.
She noted that even though each facility has its own medical director, this partnership allowed them to have a consistent treatment approach for COVID-19 across the board.
“It gave us the opportunity to have somebody look at our protocols and practices and the guidance we were giving our centers and say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ to that. Without that, we wouldn’t have had that one-stop resource. It was very valuable,” Impink explained.
Thinking out-of-the-box
Sava is now expanding the program to about six more facilities in California, Colorado, Texas and South Carolina to help manage its pandemic response. She added that she “absolutely would” recommend that other nursing home operators implement similar partnerships for their facilities.
“You had to think differently in this pandemic and you had to think outside the box,” Impink said. “This GAPs model that we put in place during this pandemic was a thinking out-of-the-box approach that worked for us.”
“Thinking out of the box during this pandemic has been helpful to us and that approach with GAPs was one example of that,” she added.
