Promoting Growth of Specialty Services within Emergency Medicine and Enhanced Advanced Practice Provider Integration & Satisfaction

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, national rates of burnout among clinical and ancillary staff skyrocketed, volumes of patients within hospitals increased, and community health efforts came to a halt. UPMCs Department of Emergency Medicine and its related services needed to strategically address the increased demand for these services, while having positive impacts on the population within their community. This paper will highlight three initiatives that were addressed by the department, and the public health relevance outside of the hospital. These projects highlight a need to promote provider well-being, specialty care, and accessibility to timely services via telemedicine. Focusing on a community need related to substance use disorders, the Telemedicine Toxicology Bridge Clinic was able to begin operating to provide care to patients who needed immediate access to resources to promote treatment adherence and positive patient outcomes, which has significant public health implications within the community. Internally, the Center for Community Medicine focused on enhancing the quality of orientation programming for its newly graduated and hired Advanced Practice Providers, to help support the increased demand on healthcare services while ensuring to care for provider well-being. Finally, the Post Cardiac Arrest Service addresses a growing need for cardiac arrest care for patients across the UPMC system, and how to focus on promoting positive patient outcomes by optimizing current processes