AdventHealth announced Thursday morning, that in conjunction with Governor DeSantis’ phased-in reopening of the state’s economy, it will be ready to continue operations under its own phased approach.
“We believe it is a safe time to reopen with the right steps and the right actions, and we think the governor has laid out a way that protects lives and minimizes the spread of COVID-19,” said Daryl Tol, CEO, AdventHealth, Central Florida Division.
The safety of staff, patients and limited visitors will be ensured with increased testing and screening, in the case of visitors.
“We will be restarting elective procedures, office visits, ambulatory procedures across our health system on Monday. We've been preparing for this for some time. We've had a team focused on preparing for this to keep you safe, to keep our community safe as well as to reassure. We'll be taking steps beyond the requirements. One of those is that every AdventHealth team member and every AdventHealth physician are being tested. We believe a baseline test of our team and ongoing surveillance testing of our team is very important. You need to know that your team is being tested and that there are asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals who can spread this,” said Tol.
All hospital patients will also be tested for COVID-19, whether they are coming in through the ER or for planned procedures.
“If you come in for emergency services or other services and you are not COVID-positive, you will not be in spaces that are interacting with COVID-positive individuals. We're taking every step possible to ensure that that's the case. Universal masking in our healthcare system, all of our staff, all of our physicians and our guests will be asked to wear masks. We will provide you with a mask when you come in to our facilities or if you already have one, that will be fine. We'll check that mask to make sure it's effective. We'll be ready in our ambulatory environments or outpatient environments and in our hospitals to have everyone masked so that you can feel comfortable interacting in that environment,” Tol continued.
Temperature checks will be performed for all employees and staff, as well as patients and screening of visitors, one of whom will be allowed per patient.
Visiting facilities and offices will be noticeably different according to Tol.
“There are opportunities for us to really rethink your experience as you come into these environments. Virtual check-ins, the ability to use your phone or other methods of phone calls, if you aren't comfortable using phone technology, to check in and alert our team that you are in place. The ability to wait in a car until the room is ready and then to go directly to a room rather than waiting in a crowded waiting room. That's something that you'll see commonly across our care locations. The ability to check out on your mobile device without standing in a line of people or close to a counter or interacting that way. We think that's also very important.
“Telehealth services and virtual care has exploded during this time. People have used it, doctors have used it to round on patients in hospitals, and people have used it to visit their physical therapists. They've used it to visit their primary care physician, even specialists. We want to continue to accelerate that work around virtual care. It is a perfect social distancing technology. You'll see virtual care becoming more and more available,” emphasized Tol.
Sanitation and cleaning procedures will be upgraded through deep cleaning of equipment after use, to deep cleaning of seats before the next person sits in that seat.
Numbers begin to show trends
Dr. Neil Finkler, CMO, Acute Care Services, said social distancing will continue to be exercised because it is that distancing that has allowed the hospital to reach this point of reopening. All sections of the hospital will be modified to accommodate distancing.
He also shared numbers on trends discovered through testing the hospital has done.
“Masking remains important as we have learned there is a percent of our population that walks around that is entirely asymptomatic. They have no symptoms that we're aware of but that actually test positive. We have tested over 51,000 patients right now for COVID-19 and we know that that risk of an asymptomatic positive is between one to two percent depending on whether you're in Orange County or Osceola County.
“This is consistent with what others have also published. The reason why the masking is so important is that that protects that individual from shedding that virus and then contaminating the rest of us. We believe as long as that one to two percent exists in the population and that we have asymptomatic carriers of this, that we need to have the masking until proven otherwise,” said Finkler.
Patients who are admitted for operative procedures are especially vulnerable and will be tested before their procedures.
“Why test them?” continued Finkler. “The big issue is that again, one to two percent of patients that are asymptomatic will be positive for the disease. We would like to identify that population and not do their operative procedure. Why is this important? We want to protect our staff and our physicians and everybody in that operating room and everybody that comes in contact with this patient from getting this disease. Probably, and maybe even more importantly, is that there are several studies out now, that show that patients who are COVID-positive, who will undergo an elective procedure have an increased mortality. There are several studies now looking at anywhere between a 20 to 40 percent postoperative mortality for an elective procedure. And I think we would all agree that is absolutely unacceptable and nowhere near what that mortality should be,” he said.
Under questioning about losses during the crisis, Tol said, “We're still in the midst of this, so we know that on the revenue side….because of a substantial drop in elective procedures and probably some necessary care that hasn't come in, hundreds of millions of dollars have left the revenue side of the equation.”
He was quick to point out they have kept their staff in place, however.
“We took a step different from other parts of the healthcare industry to hold our team in place. We have not let people go. We have not had layoffs. We've not had furloughs. Instead, we've been prepared with our full team. People have been redeployed. Redeployment tasks means you may normally work on the third floor, but you're going to go work at a temperature check station at a front door or you're going to go answer phones at 877-VIRUS HQ and answer the community's questions. Our team has been busy. Thousands of them have been working from home, if they can, as well to help the shelter in place dynamic and, we're really proud that that's the case. So, as we get back to work, we do have our full team in place, but we do expect significant losses compared to our normal because revenue's way down and we've kept our expenses up by maintaining staff in place, which we think was the right decision.”
