The Spring Hills Comprehensive Cardiac Program Journey

The comprehensive cardiac program at Spring Hills provides end-to-end cardiac care to ensure an individual’s seamless and safe transition from hospital to home. Combining 20 years of post-acute and long-term care experience with the expertise of clinicians, heart specialists and health system veterans, the program delivers unmatched cardiac care and support that helps people recover from a hospital stay and reduces their chances of post-discharge complications and readmission. With the clinical infrastructure and technologies to deliver hospital-level care, our multi-disciplinary care teams work in close partnership with our patients, their families and healthcare providers to help guide those recovering from a cardiac event on a path for improved health.

Overview of Cardiac Programs:

According to new data collected over the past few years by the American Heart Association, nearly half of the American adult population suffers from some form of cardiovascular disease. With this knowledge, cardiac programs have been developed across the United States to provide the most innovative technology to the populations facing many cardiovascular diseases. However, these cardiac programs are not generally found in the Post Acute setting, most are found in hospitals. The rate of hospital discharges to Skilled Nursing Facilities is steadily increasing in the Medicare population. With this increased need for service, it may come as a surprise that not many Post Acute centers offer cardiac specific programs and even less offer help after discharge for more than 30 days. Given these statistics, we are proud to offer our Comprehensive End2End Cardiac Program to give cardiac patients the best quality care for their needs.

Patients Comprehensive Journey:

The program begins when a patient is discharged from the hospital and is brought to one of our Post Acute Care centers. Upon arrival, patients will settle in a specific cardiac unit, a cohorted unit with only other cardiac patients. Each patient will receive care from the designated nurse practitioner that is there every day, the center’s medical director that rounds twice a week and the cardiologist once a week. This gives each patient attention from a doctor three times a week and attention from our highly trained nurse practitioners every single day. Once a patient’s stay at our facility ends, they will be discharged home with additional attention from our Spring Hills Population Health team for 90 days. They are tasked with supporting the patient in their home environment to help increase adherence to recovery efforts and significantly decrease the chance of hospital readmissions.

What is Population Health?

Spring Hills Population Health is a blend of clinical and social support for patients throughout their healthcare journey. The Population Health journey begins when someone is admitted to Spring Hills where a clinical and social work assessment is performed to evaluate how to best serve patients with the goal to get them healthy and keep them healthy. Gloria Berwick, The Vice President of Operations for Population Health described the program to be similar to that of GPS navigation. Before you embark on your journey, route options with different lengths of time, traffic factors and tolls. With Population Health, as the navigator, we help you decide which is the best healthcare route to take. Over the course of the patient journey, Population Health provides many touch points to engage the patients and make sure they have what they need when they are discharged home and is available once the patient is home for coordinated services, to provide education and to help prevent hospital readmissions.

What makes this program so special?

Apart from the focused care that a patient will experience in the program, the technology available to patients is incredible. The program highlights the use of non-invasive hemodynamic technology for cardiac monitoring that enables the nurses and doctors to look at an actionable amount of data to best treat and rehabilitate each and every patient. This is the first time in the state of New Jersey that this advanced technology is being used in a post acute care center. With the access to this technology, our centers are able to provide hospital level care in the post acute environment.

Why Spring Hills?

The comprehensive cardiac program was first started by Dr. Andrew Pecora and Monica Wallace, the current Clinical Director of Programs at Spring Hills. As the first program of its kind in the state of New Jersey, they yielded promising results and through the program were able to decrease the hospital readmission rates of cardiac patients. “Luckily the vision Alex Markowits, Founder and President/CEO for Spring Hills had included the comprehensive cardiac program” says Dr. Pecora and seeing it launch, well, “excited doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.”

Spring Hills Post Acute Care Livingston, NJ (September 16, 2020) – Last Wednesday marked the official launch of our Comprehensive Cardiac End2End Program. The day began with the official signing of the program certificate by Dr. Andrew Pecora. Joining Dr. Pecora in the celebration was Soffy Vilson, Vice President of Quality Assurance, Steven Salvanto, Administrator at Livingston Post Acute and Dr. Hawthorne, Cardiologist.

Spring Hills Post Acute Care Woodbury, NJ (September 21, 2020) – Yesterday was the official launch of our Comprehensive Cardiac End2End Program. The entire center made the launch special from the beautiful bouquets of flowers and heart shaped balloons, to the ribbon cutting and official signing, it was a fantastic day for everyone who worked so hard on the program. The official signing of the program certificate was performed by Monica Wallace, Clinical Director of Programs. Joining in on the celebration was Alex Markowits, Founder & President/CEO and our visionary leader, Dr. Peter Bulik, Cardiologist, Gloria Berwick, The Vice President of Operations for Population Health, Joseph Lausido, Sr. VP of Strategic Development, Michael Guglielmo, Administrator at Woodbury Post Acute Care, Deedra Austin-Thomas, Director of Nursing at Woodbury, Kim Komoroski, Director of Compliance and Quality Improvement, Michelle Benfield RN,BSN, Territory Manager – iRythm – Cardiac and Lauren McDowell, Nurse Practitioner at Woodbury Post Acute Care. The day was filled with celebration and concluded with the admission of the programs first patients.

Comprehensive Cardiac Program in Wayne (September 30, 2020) September 30th was the successful launch of the Comprehensive Cardiac Program in Wayne. Thank you to all of our fantastic team members that made the launch of this program possible! We can’t wait to see what the future holds for the expansion of this and other disease specific programs.