Care Connection: Expanded pediatric program comes to Passavant
Expanded pediatric health care coverage is coming to UPMC Passavant Cranberry and McCandless, as the hospitals partner with UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh to connect pediatric patients to pediatricians.
This is the first UPMC Children's Emergency Department affiliation offered in the Western Pennsylvania region.
Families will be able to schedule follow-up appointments with UPMC Children's physicians across more than 30 sub-specialties before they leave the emergency department at UPMC Passavant.
Lisa Bryan-Morris, chief nursing officer and vice president of patient care services at UPMC Passavant, said that the new partnership will make the process of going to the emergency room much more convenient for parents.
“Before, if you brought your child in to the ER with say, a broken arm, after treating them the ER would just say to make a follow-up appointment and give a list of doctors. Now, you'll leave with a follow-up appointment: any parent knows that if you call a specialist it could take days, weeks, or months to get a follow up,” she said. “Getting the peace of mind to know exactly where you're going next? I think that's huge.”
She said that the process is fairly innovative, and that it builds on policies that UPMC implemented throughout the pandemic.
“We've taken all the things that we learned and implemented them post-pandemic as well, even though it's not fully post-pandemic yet, either,” she said. “We don't want any delays happening, especially with children. There are already so many delays these days.”
The entire physician team at Passavant Cranberry and McCandless also went through additional specialized pediatric training beginning this spring.
“Every ER doctor has pediatric training, but we've gotten more specialized training to better take on pediatric issues,” Bryan-Morris said.
Physicians at Passavant also now have the ability to consult with UPMC Children's emergency medicine physicians through telemedicine calls.
“This collaborative approach with our colleagues at UPMC Children's allows us to provide a higher level of pediatric emergency care through advanced telemedicine technology right here in our communities,” said Dr. Raymond Viducich, associate chief of emergency services at UPMC Passavant, in a statement.
“By tapping into distinctive resources available to us across UPMC, it helps us address the specialty care needs of the communities we serve for Pittsburgh's northern region and surrounding counties,” Viducich said.
Bryan-Morris said that this makes communication between hospitals much more streamlined. This component mostly concerns the physicians themselves, but they also have the ability to pull a telehealth cart into the room with a patient for a live consultation with a specialist if there is such a need, a policy that began during the pandemic.
“Creating an exceptional patient experience with access to UPMC's advanced, signature specialty care is always our top priority,” UPMC Passavant president Susan Hoolahan said in a statement. “This innovative partnership with UPMC Children's best serves people who live north of Pittsburgh, providing access even closer to home to specialty pediatric emergency care.”
Bryan-Morris agrees, maintaining the biggest positive change for patients will be the ability to schedule appointments with specialists right away.
“The education and the specialized training that we've gotten for our caregivers is a big part of it,” she said. “But from a parent perspective, that appointment is huge.”
