April 22, 2021 –  With many hospitals and more than 100 outpatient centers, urgent care facilities and physician practices from the Keys through Palm Beach County, Baptist Health South Florida’s energy needs are significant. That’s why the organization is embarking on a multimillion-dollar project to better manage its energy usage and implement changes that will enhance its environmental programs throughout South Florida.
 
Baptist Health has long been environmentally aware, building facilities that take advantage of natural light, using green building supplies and incorporating recycling programs into everyday business. It also was among the first in the region to make its campuses tobacco-free. And as Earth Day 2021 approached, it became time to take the next steps to help the planet.
 
“I came into an organization that already had a strong foundation and desire to protect the environment,” says Scott Harding, Baptist Health’s new corporate vice president of facilities and construction. “But most of our buildings are in use 24/7. It’s our goal to reduce our carbon footprint further, and to have smarter, stronger and more efficient buildings.”
 
Mr. Harding, with more than 40 years of experience in healthcare construction and support from the Midwest to Florida, joined the organization in October. He has a keen understanding of the latest environmentally friendly measures. Already underway at Baptist Health is the digitizing and centralization of an energy management system designed to be more automated and to improve the remote monitoring of energy use.
 
“We are making about a $10 million investment in our energy-saving program,” Mr. Harding says. The project includes centralized control stations at each hospital. Already, efficiencies are being seen at some facilities where changes have been made. At Baptist Health’s Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, for example, the hospital’s monthly energy consumption over the past few months has decreased by about 10 percent in comparison with the same months last year. This is especially important, Mr. Harding says, as electricity costs continue to rise.
 
When Baptist Health’s West Kendall Baptist Hospital opened in 2011, the building was awarded LEED Gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council, making it one of the first gold-certified hospitals in Florida. The hospital features white roofing products to reduce the effects of heat, high-efficiency chillers and handlers, dual-flush toilets, furniture made from high-recycled content and low-emitting paints, carpets and other accessories. Since opening, it has offered charging stations for electric vehicles, hosted the county’s Adopt-a-Tree program, eliminated plastic straws and implemented dozens of other earth-friendly initiatives.
 
Since then, Baptist Health has looked for numerous ways to lower its use of electricity, gas and water across its health system. It has retrofitted lighting at all facilities so that LED, cost-effective and longer-lasting bulbs are used, analyzed its air conditioning chillers to coordinate the timing and load based on outside temperature and humidity combined with building usage, and planned renovations with the newest technologies in mind. New construction meets updated green conservation efforts.
 
“We continue to focus on improving the health and well-being of our community,” said Matt Arsenault, executive vice president and chief financial officer. “Our investments in sustainability initiatives are in line with the commitment we make to provide great healthcare for our patients and families,” adds Arsenault, the executive champion for sustainability efforts at Baptist Health. 
 
The COVID-19 pandemic also came with its own concerns that require the expertise of Baptist Health’s engineers and facilities crews. “It takes specially trained and skilled employees to ensure that negative airflow rooms are operating properly and to make common areas safer by making them have more negative airflow, too,” Mr. Harding says. “We came up with solutions that included bringing in extra equipment, opening dampers to bring in more fresh air, changing filters more frequently and making sure the infrared lights in the air handling units operated properly because they kill virus. There has been a lot of extra monitoring to keep patients and employees safe.” That was on top of the reconfiguring of areas to meet social distancing recommendations.
 
As the organization moves forward with its expanded greening projects, it is adding Grow2Heal Gardens at its hospital campuses. The first garden was planted at Homestead Hospital in 2014 and harvests more than 5,000 pounds of produce a year that is used in patient and cafeteria meals. The garden is also the site of school field trips where children learn about nutrition and plant-based meals. Several other Baptist Health hospitals have Grow2Heal Gardens as well. 
 
“As a not-for-profit health system, it is in our DNA to be socially responsible,” said Jason Bell, assistant vice president of operations. “So in addition to looking at what we can do at our facilities in terms of sustainability, we are also focused on the community education piece. Healthy people depend on a healthy environment. We take our role very seriously.”
 
 
 
 
About Baptist Health South Florida
Baptist Health South Florida is the largest healthcare organization in the region, with 11 hospitals, more than 23,000 employees, 4,000 physicians and 100 outpatient centers, urgent care facilities and physician practices spanning across Miami-Dade, Monroe, Broward and Palm Beach counties. Baptist Health has internationally renowned centers of excellence in cancer, cardiovascular care, orthopedics and sports medicine, and neurosciences. In addition, it includes Baptist Health Medical Group; Baptist Health Quality Network; and Baptist Health Care On Demand, a virtual health platform. A not-for-profit organization supported by philanthropy and committed to its faith-based charitable mission of medical excellence, Baptist Health has been recognized by Fortune as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America and by Ethisphere as one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. For more information, visit BaptistHealth.net/Newsroom and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
 


THE PARTNERSHIP WILL FOCUS ON VARIOUS AREAS OF PATIENT CARE, EDUCATION, INNOVATION AND RESEARCH 
 
April 19, 2021 –  Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center announced a partnership grounded in a shared commitment to accelerating medical innovation and best practices. Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center, the leading medical center in the Middle East, located near Tel Aviv, Israel, are entering into a three-year collaboration agreement that will generate groundbreaking developments in healthcare services, education, training, and innovation.
 
This three-year collaboration will focus on the areas of:
 
Education & Training
Innovation
Scientific Events
Delegation Visits Between Hospitals
Bilateral Research
 
"This partnership will boost our vision for Tampa General Hospital to be the safest and most innovative academic health center in America," said Tampa General Hospital president and CEO John Couris. "In partnership with the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, and our combined Office of Clinical Research, we will be sharing our talents in the areas of education, training, research and technology that will directly impact the lives of the people we care for in Tampa, and across the region and state, and eventually even beyond."
 
Sheba Medical Center is the largest hospital in Israel and consistently ranks among the top medical facilities in the world. Sheba Medical Center takes great pride in their international collaborations and believes sharing their medical knowledge and research with other institutions benefits the rest of the world.
 
“We are very excited about the prospect of working directly with Tampa General Hospital, one of America’s foremost academic medical facilities” said Yoel Har-Even, director of Sheba International. “As hope has no boundaries, we believe that combining our collective medical knowledge and injecting our innovative technological know-how will be beneficial to everyone in the metro Tampa region, the state and internationally.”
 
Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center share a passion for innovation and leading change in the healthcare setting and investing in technologies to improve patient experience and outcomes. Both have actively embraced the use of artificial intelligence to monitor care and regulate patient flow throughout their institutions.
 
Additionally, both are launching innovation hubs to support emerging companies and technology to develop effective solutions for clinical care needs. In 2020, Tampa General founded TGH Innoventures to spur innovation within the institution and transform the future of healthcare through the support of early-stage startups and direct investments. Sheba Medical Center established the ARC Center in 2019, which stands for “Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate” to give Israeli healthcare startups the opportunity to collaborate with expert physicians and hospital staff to implement global change in medicine.
 
In recent months, hundreds of new ideas and designs for finding technological models to help predict patient deterioration from the coronavirus have originated at Sheba’s Corona Hub, located on campus at the ARC Innovation Center.
 
Over the next few months, Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center will work together to identify best opportunities and paths forward to extend innovation and new developments into real world applications to improve the health of patients and local, statewide and global communities.
 
This new collaboration is not the first experience Tampa General Hospital and Sheba Medical Center have working together. The organizations first came together in June 2020 to present a coronavirus- focused webinar where they shared experiences and insights. The successful event sparked the idea for a greater partnership between institutions. 
 
About Tampa General Hospital
 
Tampa General Hospital, a 1007-bed non-profit academic medical center, is one of the largest hospitals in America and delivers world-class care as the region’s only center for Level l trauma and comprehensive burn care. Tampa General Hospital is the highest-ranked hospital in the market in U.S. News & World Report’s 2020-21 Best Hospitals, and one of the top four hospitals in Florida, with five specialties ranking among the best programs in the United States. It is one of the nation’s busiest adult solid organ transplant centers and is the primary teaching hospital for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. With five medical helicopters, Tampa General Hospital transports critically injured or ill patients from 23 surrounding counties to receive the advanced care they need. Tampa General houses a nationally accredited comprehensive stroke center and its 32-bed Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit is the largest on the West Coast of Florida. It also is home to the Jennifer Leigh Muma 82-bed Level IV neonatal intensive care unit, and a nationally accredited rehabilitation center. Tampa General Hospital’s footprint includes 17 Tampa General Medical Group Primary Care offices, TGH Family Care Center Kennedy, TGH Brandon Healthplex, TGH Virtual Health and 19 outpatient Radiology Centers. Tampa Bay residents also receive world-class care from the TGH Urgent Care powered by Fast Track network of clinics, and they can even receive home visits in select areas through TGH Urgent Care at Home, powered by Fast Track. As one of the largest hospitals in the country, Tampa General is first in Florida to partner with GE Healthcare and open a clinical command center that uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve and better coordinate patient care at a lower cost. For more information, go to www.tgh.org.
 
About Sheba Medical Center 
 
Born together with Israel in 1948, Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer is the largest and most comprehensive medical center in the Middle East. Sheba is the only medical center in Israel that combines an acute care hospital and a rehabilitation hospital on one campus, and it is at the forefront of medical treatments, patient care, research and education. As a university teaching hospital affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University, it welcomes people from all over the world indiscriminately. For the past two years (2019 and 2020), Newsweek Magazine has named Sheba one of the top ten hospitals in the world. For more information, visit: eng.sheba.co.il.


April 22, 2021  – Although dementia is often primarily associated memory loss, some who develop dementia will also experience loss of the ability to understand or express speech. On April 28, join the Alzheimer’s Association for “When Our Words Fail Us,” a free virtual program that will educate attendees on aphasia and how to cope with it.
 
As part of the Association’s ongoing “Ask the Expert Series,” the program will feature keynote speaker Marilyn Neil, a speech-language pathologist at Sarasota Memorial Outpatient Rehab Clinic. Neil will discuss the benefits of speech therapy for those with aphasia.
 
“Communication is our connection to the world,” Neil said. “Aphasia robs us of making those connections vital to our quality of life. The good news is that there is much we can do to minimize the effects of aphasia for significant periods of time. 
 
“It’s hard work and it takes a commitment to lifestyle and behavior changes, but in my 30 years of experience, the value we gain from maintaining our ability to deeply connect with those we love is worth the effort to achieve these outcomes,” she continued. “Early intervention yields the best results when it comes to slowing down effects of aphasia – particularly aphasia that comes on slowly as a result of progressive illness.”
 
Following Neil’s presentation, Alzheimer’s Community Educator Amanda Tatum will share some effective communication strategies for those caring for loved ones with dementia.
 
Bernice Pelea, program manager for the Alzheimer’s Association, noted: “As dementia progresses, a breakdown in communication can often form a barrier between those living with dementia and their caregivers. With this program, we aim to help bridge the gap so that families can remain connected with their loved ones when words are no longer enough.”
 
“When Our Words Fail Us” will begin at 1 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 28. Register by calling the Alzheimer’s Association 24/7 Helpline at (800) 272-3900 or by visiting 
http://bit.ly/WhenOurWordsFailUs. 
 
Alzheimer’s Association®
The Alzheimer’s Association is a worldwide voluntary health organization dedicated to Alzheimer’s care, support and research. Our mission is to lead the way to end Alzheimer’s and all other dementia – by accelerating global research, driving risk reduction and early detection, and maximizing quality care and support. Our vision is a world without Alzheimer’s and all other dementia. Visit alz.org or call (800) 272-3900.
 

 



Banner 2020 and first quarter 2021 fuel rapid ChenMed expansion in four states
 
April 22, 2021  – ChenMed, a leading senior-focused primary care practice, today announced leases are signed on the first 18 of 26 new medical practices it expects to open in 2021. The physician-owned and led company is self-funding these initial openings in four states, having achieved 19 percent net member growth in 2020, along with 11 percent higher net membership growth during the first quarter of 2021.
 
The first wave of 2021 new ChenMed practice openings includes six new centers in Detroit, five new centers in Houston, and significant expansions in greater Miami, up 36 percent; Orlando, up 33 percent; Tampa Bay, up 20 percent; and New Orleans, up 25 percent.
 
“Our commitment to underserved communities has never been stronger,” says Christopher Chen, M.D. ChenMed CEO. “We’ll soon be operating nearly 95 primary care centers in 12 states, in the neighborhoods where they are most needed. We already are applying so many learnings from the coronavirus pandemic to further sharpen the high-touch primary care we effectively deliver to tens of thousands of low-income seniors with complex health and an average age of 72 years.”
 
ChenMed doctors fulfill their purpose by being accountable for helping their patients achieve better health, including responding quickly to patient calls or texts to their cell phones and honoring same-day telehealth or in-person appointments when needed. Plus, ChenMed centers offer services that help reduce barriers to healthy living, from transportation assistance to on-site medications to helping with social services, along with weekly “love calls” to check on patients. 
 
“We’re a provider of choice for more than 20 Medicare Advantage health plans precisely because of our practice’s proven ability to pivot whenever needed to improve both quality of care and patient experience,” explains Jason Barker, chief operations officer at ChenMed. “Our doctors and care teams do whatever it takes to help vulnerable seniors stay healthy and happy. We deliver affordable VIP care that includes patients having their primary care doctor’s cell phone number and being able to see their doctor same day, either by telehealth or a safe in-person appointment.”
 
ChenMed centers are universally located in underserved neighborhoods, where lack of access to high quality primary care and other social determinants of health have negatively impacted longevity for many years. These barriers have shortened average life spans by as much as 20 years when compared to older adults living in nearby more affluent zip codes. So, the innovative medical practice is working to address what Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr heralded more than 50 years ago: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”
 
Community service is a ChenMed medical practice hallmark. So, every Chen, Dedicated or JenCare Senior Medical Center opening means another underserved neighborhood starts receiving strategic good will from the mission-driven practice. For example, ChenMed recently pushed forward its VaxTheNation™ program in all 10 of the states in which it operates more than 75 centers. This physician-led community service initiative has, during the past six weeks alone, safely administered more than 50,000 COVID-19 vaccinations to seniors in neighborhoods having heightened need, as spotlighted in the latest COVID-19 vaccines race and ethnicity report. 
 
Published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the report shows that:
•Blacks represent 16 percent of Florida’s population and 17 percent of COVID-19 deaths; yet, only eight percent of Florida COVID-19 vaccinations
•Hispanics represent 27 percent of Florida’s population and 37 percent of COVID-19 cases; yet only 21 percent of Florida COVID-19 vaccinations
•Blacks represent 11 percent of Pennsylvania’s population and 12 percent of COVID-19 deaths; yet only four percent of Pennsylvania COVID-19 vaccinations
•Hispanics represent 18 percent of Illinois’ population and 25 percent of COVID-19 cases; yet only 11 percent of Illinois COVID-19 vaccinations
 
 
 
About ChenMed
ChenMed, headquartered in Miami, is a privately owned medical, management and technology company that delivers the high-touch and personalized primary care Medicare Advantage-eligible seniors need to enjoy better health. This high-touch primary care is shown to reduce coronavirus deaths by 40 percent, according to a study published in American Journal of Preventive Cardiology. Named one of Fortune 2020 “Change the World” companies, ChenMed brings concierge-style medicine and better health outcomes to the neediest populations. ChenMed brands include Chen Senior Medical Center, Dedicated Senior Medical Center and JenCare Senior Medical Center.
 


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