Having recently discharged its 4,000th COVID-19 inpatient, AtlantiCare looks to further support the community by sharing best practices. Many of the care approaches the healthcare organization implemented through two years of the pandemic led to significantly better outcomes compared to national statistics.
Through the first three patient surges, AtlantiCare’s survival rate for COVID-19-positive inpatients was 90%, compared to the national average of 80.2% during the same period. Additionally, an average of 7.95% of AtlantiCare’s COVID-positive inpatients were admitted to the intensive care unit from the start of the pandemic through January 26, 2022. The national average was 16.6% for the same timeframe. (Statistics based on AtlantiCare’s analysis of published data in peer-reviewed journals.)
Edward Hamaty, D.O., chair, Department of Critical Care, AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, saw firsthand the importance of evolving care throughout the pandemic. “We adopted World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health best practices early on,” said Hamaty. “These included providing support to keep patients off
ventilators, using steroids in our treatment plan when appropriate, admitting patients who met criteria for being hospitalized, and releasing hospitalized patients and Emergency Department patients appropriately.”
Additional best practices AtlantiCare adopted included communicating the importance of vaccines and providing vaccines at regional sites throughout the third and fourth surges. “Once vaccinations became widely available, most patients admitted to the ICU for COVID-19 or complications of COVID-19 were individuals who had not been vaccinated,” continued Hamaty. “Our joint effort with the State of New Jersey, Atlantic County, and the New Jersey Air National Guard at the Atlantic County COVID-19 Vaccination Megasite was key to preventing COVID-19 infection, serious disease and complications. We continue to focus on keeping our community informed and protected. It is still critical that those who are eligible get vaccinated and boosted.”
AtlantiCare’s multidisciplinary team performed daily evaluations and updates for patient care practices. They standardized their
COVID-19 inpatient care guidelines six times and continue to do so. AtlantiCare’s COVID-19 Preparedness Incident Command team included infection prevention, emergency, physicians, nursing, pharmacy, respiratory therapy, laboratory, procurement, food and nutrition, customer experience, environmental services; primary, urgent and specialty care teams; and other clinical and non-clinical roles/departments.
