The Big Payout: Colorado health care providers used COVID aid as lifelines to stay afloat

  • 📰 denverpost
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 122 sec. here
  • 4 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 52%
  • Publisher: 72%

Health Health Headlines News

Health Health Latest News,Health Health Headlines

The Denver Post profiled a number of medical providers, from the big to the small, to find out how they used funds from the Provider Relief Fund. Here are their stories.

There is no masking when it comes to dental work. Mouths agape, every patient is a potential coronavirus spreader who can grind a dentist’s office to a halt in a matter of days.

Arapahoe County received the largest slice out of Colorado’s 64 counties — $345 million as of mid-January — money that went out to nearly 1,000 medical providers, ranging from giant hospital companies to cancer clinics to ambulance services to dental and chiropractic offices. Medical Laboratory Scientist Heather Salazar collects a blood sample from Trina Elliott at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers in Aurora on Thursday, March 17, 2022.The email came in on April 10, 2020 — Good Friday — informing Glenn Balasky, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, that his 13 clinics up and down the Front Range would be getting money from the provider relief fund.and already the effects of the pandemic were hitting the state’s medical community hard.

But one of the big unanticipated costs put upon Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers by the pandemic was establishing the means and infrastructure to treat people from afar. It’s something the organization hadn’t done much with before COVID-19 hit Colorado, Balasky said. “Until we knew what we were dealing with, we were trying to be very cautious about who we were letting into the building,” said Dan Frank, Craig’s chief financial officer. “We were shut down to about 5% of our total outpatient volume for several months.”

The hospital had to establish negative airflow rooms to minimize virus transmission in sensitive settings, hire additional staff to screen visitors entering the building and make a costly foray into telemedicine as more medical appointments went virtual.Click to enlarge Centura, Massey said, also gave “appreciation pay” to its employees, along with child care, grocery shopping support and free meals to keep up morale among workers in an industry that got walloped by the pandemic.

That means having to stand up 19 ambulances across 30 fire stations for the more than half a million people in its jurisdiction — even when traffic is down. “That went on for several months — there was one person whose full-time job was decontaminating ambulances from hospital to hospital,” he said. “They would put on a low-level hazmat suit with special boots and they would clean the back of the ambulance and the stretcher.”South Metro Fire Rescue Capt. Sheryl West uses an electrostatic sprayer to disinfect the Medic 12 ambulance in Littleton on April 19, 2020. She disinfects the entire interior of the vehicle after each run.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.
We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 13. in HEALTH

Health Health Latest News, Health Health Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

San Diego County records second fatal pediatric COVID-19 caseThe San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency Wednesday reported its second pediatric death from COVID-19, a 15-year-old girl who died Feb. 3. Oh lawd not again So sad. And, her death probably would have been avoided if she was vaccinated. It’s easy to get out there and get vaccinated to help save someone else’s life.
Source: 10News - 🏆 732. / 50 Read more »

Scientists develop indoor-active photocatalyst for antiviral coating against various COVID variantsA photocatalyst made using a combination of titanium dioxide (TiO2) and copper oxide (CuxO) nanoclusters inactivates various variant types of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a recent breakthrough, scientists in Nara Medical University, Kanagawa Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, and Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed this antiviral photocatalyst, which has been proven to be effective under both darkness and indoor light.
Source: physorg_com - 🏆 388. / 55 Read more »