SavaSeniorCare Partnerships

Pilot Program

McKnight’s reported that SavaSeniorCare successfully recovered more than 1,000 residents with COVID-19. The success was a result of a partnership with a physician group. The partnership started with the Geriatric Administrative Provider Services (GAPs) physician group in May to help treat COVID-19 residents.

The GAPs physicians acted as COVID-19 specialists. They assisted the facility medical directors over a period of eight weeks. The physicians conducted virtual rounds multiple times a week.  The pilot program included a dozen Sava facilities to combat COVID.

“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, Sava’s senior vice president chief operations council. 

“I think we would have struggled without them,” she told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News. Now, the company is exporting the program to other facilities to manage the disease and prevent future outbreaks.

SavaSeniorCare

SavaSeniorCare is an Atlanta-based national for-profit nursing home chain. The Company currently operates 169 facilities across the United States.  The physician groups conducted training with staff about properly wearing and disposing personal protective equipment. The experts reviewed company policies and procedures 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. “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.

This partnership allowed the national chain to have a consistent and uniform 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.