The front desk and other frontline staff at East Georgia Healthcare Center, Inc. (EGHC) are renowned for giving careful attention to patients and providing exceptional service. During the COVID-19 pandemic, amid difficult challenges, EGHC frontline staff have gone even further by developing new ways to ensure patients are seen in-person and receive treatments as efficiently and quickly as possible.
For instance, EGHC has a clinical quality committee whose membership rotates among different providers and specialties at the health center. After the pandemic started, EGHC leadership used the committee’s expertise, with input from additional frontline staff, to help form messages about COVID-19 testing, vaccines, and personal protective equipment in a way that would make sense to the public. The group also developed scripts for patient visits and phone calls to ensure staff share the same information about COVID-19 treatment availability and the pharmacies closest to each patient requiring those treatments.
While EGHC staff work to provide treatment to patients with COVID-19, they continue to address patient needs beyond COVID-19. Peyton Frye, practice manager at EGHC, shared, “As we like to say, people still get regular sick.” One patient shared, “These ladies at the Baxley office are awesome…They went above and beyond to help us find a pharmacy to get my husband’s insulin where we could afford it.” EGHC providers give COVID-19 at-home self-tests to anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 at the clinic to share with family and friends. By reducing the number of visits for COVID-19 tests, providers at EGHC clinics and mobile health units have had more time to see patients with chronic conditions or other health concerns.
In all, EGHC staff have come together to ensure they can efficiently and quickly provide treatment to patients with COVID-19 and other health concerns. They have given out more than 15,500 COVID-19 at-home self-tests and continue to offer COVID-19 oral therapeutics free thanks to HRSA’s COVID-19 Response Programs.