Skilled Nursing Facility Cardiovascular Services
Our Philosophy
Welcome to Premier Cardiovascular Institute. We are a unique community-based advanced heart failure and cardiovascular disease management program. We treat all stages and classes of heart failure and our primary goal is improving our patients’ quality of life using personalized care plans.
Our approach to care is better by design. We use only evidence-based and scientifically proven methods to diagnose, treat, and maintain the highest quality of life for our senior citizens.
Everything we do is specifically designed just for you. With us, it’s personal. It doesn’t matter if a treatment or medicine is good. What matters to us is whether it’s good for you and your loved ones.
Our specialists have been designing and building high quality healthcare programs for more than 20 years and we know better care doesn’t just happen by accident. Better care happens with hard work and by continuous improvement and measurement. We created a new way of providing high quality care that is beneficial, effective, timely, targeted, efficient, and reliable. Patient is always at the center.
Collaborative Approach
As a facility operator, the health and wellbeing of your residents is always top of mind. Comfort, convenience, and best-in-class care are our priorities as well. That’s why we meet your residents where they are, providing exceptional care in their room, virtually, or at one of our on-site clinics.
Through our collaborative care approach, Premier Cardiovascular Institute actively partners with facilities, communities, and healthcare professionals to dramatically improve how care is delivered to patients in skilled nursing communities. Our care delivery model, solves the challenges seniors face accessing healthcare benefits by creating seamless communication between patients, families, and providers.
We Are Long Term Care Experts
As many as 3 out of 4 people aged 65 and older have two or more chronic conditions that negatively impact the quality of their lives. This is why our experience practicing cardiovascular medicine in long-term facilities is advantageous. A complaint of difficulty breathing can be caused by many conditions of the heart, lungs, kidneys, or other rare cuases like anemia.
Our broad experience simultaneously managing multiple chronic conditions means vulnerable and debilitated residents do not have to run back and forth to multiple specialists risking infection and other harm. Premier Cardiovascular Institute brings a high level of expertise right to the patient’s bedside. Our programs are designed to keep patients safely at their facility while providing best care anywhere. Our technology and experienced practitioners can perform many point of care diagnostic heart tests right in the residents room when ordered not limitted to EKGs, echocardiograms and others.
How Can We Help ?
Hospitals have become reliant on skilled nursing facilities to accept sicker, high risk patients in their effort to reduce their own lengths of stay. Unfortunately, research shows this tactic doesn’t work and nearly 25% of these vulnerable patients return to the hospital within a month of discharge.
A big part of the problem is the increased complexity of these patients, most of whom have multiple chronic conditions. In addition, hospitals tend to treat what the patient came in for and other chronic conditions may or may not have been treated or stabilized.
Skilled Nursing Facilities also lack the robust support of specialists enjoyed by hospitals and long term acute care facilities to mange such patients. Moreover, the use of tools like function-focus clinical care pathways to manage complex patients with multiple chronic conditions is not uniformly practiced.
Premier Cardiovascular Institute providers are experts at practicing cardiovascular medicine in skilled nursing facilities. We implement our targeted programs to manage patients with different needs including newly discharged patients, intermediate rehabilitation patients, and long term residents. Our solutions are personalized and blend with the existing care plan. We are focused on quality care delivery and our approach has been demonstrated to improve skilled nursing homes readmission and mortality rankings as well as overall star-ratings.
Expertise And Partnership
Premier Cardiovascular Institute uses a systematic approach to treating all patients which ensures every patient gets the care they need and assures delivery of quality care.
Premier Cardiovascular Institute assigns the same care delivery team of providers to each skilled facility. This allows a true partnership to form and the team gets to know facility residents very well and develops close working relationship with the administrative and clinical staff.
Premier Cardiovascular Institute provides 24/7 patient coverage and support to nursing and clinical staff. We also provide cardiovascular training, in-service, and continuing education when requested. Nurses at all levels are encouraged to be proactive and call our team with any questions or concerns. We don’t mind false alarms at all because it means the early warning system is working.
Our Goals
You provide a great place to live. We provide great care. Together, we’re transforming senior living through a collaborative value-based care model. By integrating ourselves with your staff, we know if a resident isn’t feeling well and didn’t make it to lunch that day. We’re on campus and can see if he or she has a beggining of heart failure or uncontroled Atrial fibrillation. We also have best-in-class technology and analytics to alert our doctors of early onset of diseases or illnesses. Our embedded clinician care model can help you:
- Attract more residents.
- Extend your staff without adding to your payroll.
- Reduce hospital admission rates.
- Reduce transportation costs.
- Improve your census as residents stay in place longer.
Transitional Care Program
Many of the 20-25% 30-day hospital re-admissions are unrelated to the initial problem and represent a worsening of one or more chronic conditions. These readmissions are very disruptive to residents’ quality of life and can often be prevented with diligent monitoring and regular assessment by the Premier Cardiovascular Institute team.
Our Transitional Care Program for SNFs mirrors our Transitional Care Clinic set up to help non-SNF vulnerable patients discharge into the community. Both our transitional programs were designed to smooth the return to normal life after an acute hospital admission. The key is using a consistent process for assuring stability of the patient’s multiple chronic conditions so that none exacerbate others leading to readmission. Premier Cardiovascular Institute clinical pathways ensure that evidence-based treatments are re-instituted for each condition. The program’s overarching goal is to keep patients moving forward in their recovery process and return to normal.
Acute-Tele-Clinic (ATC)
We always knew our patients were at risk and every year we make sure they get their flu shots. The COVID-19 attacks have been more devastating to heart failure patients than expected. In response we created an extension of our virtual care visits to take care of patients with heart disease with worsening symptoms while sheltered in place. Our Acute-Tele-Clinic (ATC) dedicated to SNF works by increasing the intensity of care for patients with worsening symptoms by placing them on advanced remote monitoring system with continuous vital signs, heart rhythm, and lung fluid assessment. We make adjustments to their medical regimen based on the daily tele-rounds, telemetry information, and in conjunction with nursing assessments just as we would do in the hospital. We follow the patient on daily video rounds with face to face visits. Most patients turn around after few days and can then be “discharged” from virtual acute care back to their regular monitoring and routine visits.
Treatment at the facility would avoid exposing these vulnerable patients to infections in the ED or hospital ward. The Acute-Tele-Clinic program can also be deployed at SNFs to more closely monitor recent hospital discharges to be certain their heart failure has been well-treated.