East Orange General Hospital has been providing care to the Newark community for generations. Since 2019, TeamHealth has been proud to provide emergency medicine services to the facility.
For more than two years, this partnership has transformed the care landscape of the community, which includes a traditionally underserved patient population. Becoming partners in the community was the first step to providing emergency medical care to those most in need.
Implementing Critical Care at East Orange
When East Orange needed critical care support, TeamHealth was there. Building from the ground up, the collaborative partnership stood up a functioning critical care program in a matter of weeks, helping to support community clinicians and provide essential ICU care to the sickest patients, despite the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation built by the emergency medicine program already in place was critical to the new program’s success.
“Collaboration has been the key to this program’s success. Our leadership, clinicians and hospital leaders work closely to improve the quality of patient care, whether that be helping throughput or decreasing the length of stay, which we were able to do at East Orange. We all work together as one team, and that’s remarkable.” – Ije Akunyili, MD, MBA, MPA, FACEP, Regional Medical Director, TeamHealth Emergency Medicine, Northeast Group
Providing vital critical care services, TeamHealth was able to help East Orange reduce ventilator days, readmissions, length of stay and mortality rates. Through collaboration and teamwork, the teams were also able to instill new energy into the facility, helping boost morale and improve patient care. Part of this success stems from the integrative, cooperative efforts among service line champions, clinicians and hospital leadership.
Improving Patient Experience and Community Care
The integrative care model of the Emergency Medicine, Hospital Medicine and Critical Care teams and collaborative efforts from TeamHealth leadership and the facility helped improve the standard of care in the community. Harnessing the power of a national network of support, TeamHealth leadership works with facilities and clinicians to coordinate care and communicate effectively. At East Orange, this success shines through the integrated efforts to improve patient care and experience.
TeamHealth’s APEX program – utilized by the Emergency Medicine program at East Orange and expanding to Hospital Medicine and Critical Care this year – plays a huge role in maintaining high-quality patient communication. The patient experience program emphasizes spending time with patients, connecting resources, understanding cultural sensitivity and validating patient experiences to ensure excellent care. These strategies for sustaining exceptional care became crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facing COVID-19 Together
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many truths in healthcare, including the value of hospitalists and critical care specialists. As the need for hospital-based care surged throughout the pandemic, hospitalists and intensivists stepped up to serve critically ill patients. At East Orange, intensivists and hospitalists provided vital coverage as the number of patients in the ICU intensified.
Because many patients in the community were historically underserved, TeamHealth and East Orange had to tackle many barriers to care, including treatment follow-through and transition of care to outpatient clinicians. One of the ways TeamHealth helped in this area was through primary care physician outreach. While PCPs had traditionally covered all their patients in the hospital, with TeamHealth’s new Hospital Medicine program, PCPs entrusted the care of their patients to hospitalists during the inpatient stay. This allows PCPs to care for their patients in the office instead of fracturing their valuable time. This transition required a systematic approach to building relationships with the medical staff. Working through COVID-19 together has allowed East Orange and TeamHealth to continue providing high-quality patient care, even when faced with the impossible.
Critical Care Support at TeamHealth
TeamHealth’s ability to respond quickly when our partners need us most is something we take seriously. Our leadership is the foundation of this success, as our Facility Medical Directors facilitate care models to meet our partners where they’re at – something we know is vital in a shifting modern healthcare landscape. This allows our world-class team of clinicians to provide exceptional care where it’s needed most. To learn more, please contact us.
About TeamHealth
At TeamHealth, our purpose is to perfect the practice of medicine, every day, in everything we do. We are proud to be the leading integrated physician practice in the U.S., driven by our commitment to quality and safety and supported by our world-class operating team. To improve the experience of our physicians and advanced practice clinicians, we empower clinicians to act on what they believe is right, free clinicians from distractions so they can focus on patient care, invest in learning and development to promote growth in the clinical field and foster an environment where continuous improvement is a shared priority. Through our more than 15,500 affiliated physicians and advanced practice clinicians, TeamHealth offers emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care, anesthesiology, orthopedic surgery, general surgery, obstetrics, inpatient psychiatry, ambulatory care, post-acute, behavioral health care and medical call center solutions to approximately 2,900 acute and post-acute facilities and physician groups nationwide. .