Lehigh Valley Physician Group

Our weller education services provide highly regarded programs administered by professional educator in schools across the region. Lvrch promotes safety and healthy living in various forums throughout the year. The most notable is our community canvas program, which in partnership with the kellyn foundation provides programs in over 17 elementary schools that promote good nutrition and healthy living.primary care:primary care physicians and apcs provide high-quality, comprehensive, coordinated care to adults and children. We focus on a high-value, patient-centered approach based in longitudinal relationships. Our care model includes same-day illness and injury care, complex disease management, chronic care management, and preventive care. We accept medical assistance patients, offer vfc at all our locations that serve the pediatric population, and promote an equitable, safe, and friendly care environment for patients of all demographics. Our patients now have access to care through telehealth both to their established primary care clinician as well as to expresscare and specialty care. This technology creates a paradigm of enhanced access in a convenient manner. We also have several programs which enhance the well-being of the community. We offer a physician-led literacy program called "reach out and read," through which children visiting a participating practice receive an age-appropriate book during their annual well-child visit. In collaboration with the lehigh valley topper cancer institute, we have increased rates of lung cancer screening including efforts to reduce disparities in screening rates. Our linkage to addiction treatment & opioid stewardship program has continued to support our practices in providing medications for opioid use disorder (moud) across 7 counties. Many of these patients face intense barriers to care such as chronic homeless, past incarceration, and undertreated mental health conditions. The mobile harm reduction team, with support from lehigh county drug and alcohol, has initiated outreach, naloxone distribution and mobile medical visits for people who use drugs in the hard-hit 7th street neighborhood of allentown. Our practices are highly engaged in educational efforts, contributing to the skill development of primary care nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and physicians. We have a long-standing family medicine residency training program which produces 8 graduates each year, a sports medicine fellowship, and a geriatric medicine fellowship. Our educational footprint also includes clinical partnerships with many local colleges and universities, as well as the philadelphia college of osteopathic medicine and the university of south florida morsani college of medicine. Express care:lehigh valley health network's expresscare provides comprehensive, walk-in care for patients of all ages, offering a wide range of treatments without requiring an appointment. Open 365 days a year from 8 a.m. To 8 p.m., expresscare, exceeding 350,000 visits annually and maintaining patient throughput under 50 minutes, with a net promoter score of 78.5, handles everything from upper respiratory infections, ear infections and colds to sprains, strains, and orthopedic injuries. For added convenience, patients can also schedule appointments ahead of time to minimize wait times using our 'save my spot' option for expedited scheduling in our centers. In addition, we provide piaa sports physicals, ensuring student-athletes meet the health requirements to safely participate in their activities. To make the process even smoother, we dispense certain medications on-site, so patients can receive both treatment and the necessary medications in one convenient stop, without needing a trip to the pharmacy.in 2024, we expanded our services by adding a new expresscare location in hazleton, further improving access for the community. As part of our ongoing commitment to making healthcare more accessible, we plan to open four additional locations in the coming year: bath, easton, middle smithfield, and lehighton. These new sites will allow us to better serve the region by bringing high-quality care closer to home, reducing travel times for patients, and ensuring that urgent care is always within reach.in addition to our in-person services, expresscare offers flu and covid-19 vaccinations, allowing families to stay current on preventive care. With a focus on convenience, patients can easily stop by for these vaccines during their visit, promoting wellness and protection against seasonal illnesses. We also offer telehealth services every day from 8 a.m. To 8 p.m., providing virtual visits for conditions that do not require an in-person examination for patients 3 years of age and older. The telemedicine team continues to grow as the community recognizes the need for virtual acute care with patient volumes in fy24 exceeding 32,000 patients. Lehigh valley health network continues to expand its expresscare clinician onboarding program to ensure new hires are fully equipped for success in the urgent care setting, which has been instrumental in improving retention. The program now includes family and internal medicine advanced practice clinicians (apcs), who spend a portion of their time in urgent care prior to full clinical work with family or internal medicine. This approach helps them develop proficiency in acute care medicine, ensuring they are prepared to handle a wide variety of patient needs in both primary and urgent care settings.at expresscare, we are committed to continuity of care, which is why we partner closely with our primary care clinicians. If a patient requires follow-up after their visit, we coordinate with their primary care clinician to ensure a seamless transition for ongoing care. Our integrated approach not only delivers immediate, expert care at expresscare but also supports the patient's long-term health needs. By expanding our locations and services, we are improving access to high-quality, patient-centered care across the region.medical specialties:lvpg provides a broad array of medical specialty care across the lehigh region. Care coordination with access to specialty areas and collaboration with primary care colleagues is essential to provide optimal patient outcomes for our community. Our teams provide a broad array of specialty services in the following medical specialties: allergy, immunology, endocrinology, bariatric/obesity medicine, rheumatology, infectious disease, travel medicine, pulmonary, critical care, sleep medicine, gastroenterology, geriatrics, hospice, palliative medicine, occupational medicine, and rehabilitation medicine. Specialty care in cardiology, hematology and neurology are offered through the heart & vascular institute, cancer institute and neuroscience institute, respectively. Some highlights of our programs are summarized below:1. Oacis the nationally recognized oacis (optimizing advanced complex illness support) team of certified physicians, registered nurse practitioners (crnps), social workers, nurses and support professionals provides palliative care in the home and office for over 900 patients across the region. Services are available within an identified geographic region to individuals living with serious illness and can be provided in the patient's home, assisted living facilities, select skilled nursing facilities as well as two office locations at 1250 cedar crest allentown and the health center at palmer township. In-person and virtual visits are available to the entire lvhn footprint. Phone access to office-based nurses and social workers is available to patients, family members, physicians and community agencies for information and assistance. The oacis team works to develop a plan of care that promotes quality of life and works to ease the suffering involved with serious illness.

2. Advanced intensive care unit (aicu program) the advanced intensive care unit (aicu), the lehigh valley health network's tele-critical care unit, opened in 2004 as one of the one of the first of its kind in the united states. It is a centralized remote monitoring unit where a team composed of a pulmonary critical care physician, three experienced critical care nurses and a staff assistant, provides support to lvhn's icus across the network. The team works together utilizing the latest in electronic medical record information and remote monitoring technologies with two-way audio video capabilities. The aicu team works with the bedside team as an extra layer of care, monitoring vital signs and laboratory data to detect trends that may indicate a change in a patient's condition. This allows for a proactive approach that addresses the critical care patient's unique needs quickly. Today the program covers more than 130 critical care beds every night throughout the year. The lvhn aicu program has been a pioneer in this work, publishing one of the first national retrospective analyses of the impact of this care on reducing the amount of time on ventilators and overall mortality among critical care patients. 3. Comprehensive health services (former aids activities office) lvhn comprehensive health services (chs) is a regional leader in the provision of a broad range of services for the treatment and prevention of hiv and viral hepatitis as well as a growing program offering care to the trans and gender diverse community. Chs continues to be the largest provider of hiv services in the region and has been a recipient of a federal ryan white hiv/aids program grant since the early 1990s. Caring for almost 1100 individuals living with hiv, chs provides whole-person hiv care including integrated primary care and psychiatric services, adherence, education, medical case management, behavioral health support, nutrition, prevention, outreach, testing and quality management activities through a multidisciplinary staff. Chs also offers pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep) for the prevention of hiv infection and coordinates post-exposure prophylaxis (pep) for lvhn for both occupational (non-lvhn) and non-occupational exposures to hiv. Comprehensive health services has recently become a leading provider of gender-affirming hormone therapy for the trans and gender-diverse (tgd) community. In recent years, stigma related to a tgd identity has decreased resulting in more individuals seeking gender-affirming treatment and procedures. As long-term advocates for high-quality care for lgbtq+ individuals, chs launched its program in 2018 with the integration of an experienced endocrinologist. Chs continues to grow this program and can serve as a hub of a potential lvhn transgender medicine program by integrating medical specialty, primary care, and psychosocial services as well as lvhn surgical offerings in a coordinated fashion.4. Hepatitis care centeranother practice under the umbrella of comprehensive health center, the hepatitis care center (hcc) has been one of the largest regional practices devoted to the treatment and management of hepatitis b and c since 2007. In addition to curative antiviral therapy for hcv and suppressive treatment for hbv, the hcc now collaborates closely with the lvhn transplant program to evaluate hcv-negative kidney transplant candidates for appropriateness of receiving kidneys from hcv-infected deceased donors. With the ability to cure a newly acquired hcv-infection resulting from such a transplant, the number of transplants performed annually can be increased through expansion of the donor pool, which may also result in decreased wait times.5. Interventional pulmonary program the interventional pulmonary program comprises a collaborative multidisciplinary team consisting of four physicians, an apc, and a nurse navigator. The goal of this program is to expedite the evaluation of patients with possible lung cancer found on thoracic imaging. The physicians utilize robotic bronchoscopy, convex endobronchial ultrasound (ebus), radial ebus, and fluoroscopy to localize lesions for biopsy. Nodules as small as 6mm can now be safely biopsied, leading to earlier stage cancer being diagnosed faster than previously possible. Physicians are trained on all diagnostic modalities. This allows for streamlining scheduling and places a stronger emphasis on faster time to diagnosis by removing scheduling barriers. All patients referred for possible lung cancer are evaluated by one of the interventional bronchoscopists at their initial visit, as well as one-week post-procedure to review results and next steps in work-up or treatment. The nurse navigator guides the patient through this process from initial visit through to transition to the treatment team. She is a single point of contact for these patients for questions or concerns and helps to alleviate anxiety during a tumultuous time in their lives. This program, coupled with lvhn's expanding lung cancer screening program, is leading to a shift to earlier stage lung cancer being diagnosed. Additionally, the bronchoscopic lung volume reduction (blvr) program continues to grow. The goal of the procedure is to achieve a reduction in residual volume through bronchoscopic placement of one-way endobronchial valves into the most damaged lobe which leads to decreased symptoms, improved exercise capacity, and improved quality of life. Physiologically, this is the equivalent of a lobectomy without an incision.6. Sleep medicine program the sleep medicine section of pulmonary and critical care provides comprehensive sleep care by a team of physicians and apcs. The network currently has 10 sleep center locations (3 outpatient and 7 home testing sites) and completes more than 8,000 sleep studies annually, including both in-lab and home-based studies. In-laboratory testing occurs at lvh-17th street, health center at bethlehem township, and the lvh-hazelton sleep labs. Sleep physicians care for patients with obstructive sleep apnea, complex apneas and respiratory failure, restless legs, insomnia, and rem sleep behavior disorder as well as co-management with ohns/ent of surgical sleep patients. The sleep clinician team offers patients a wide variety of locations for evaluation including outpatient sleep and pulmonary medicine sites at lvh-17th street, health center at bethlehem township, lvh-cedar crest, lvh-muhlenberg, and health center at palmer township. They also provide a robust video visit component to sleep care for patients in our surrounding areas. Lvhn's inspire program for treatment of obstructive sleep apnea continues to grow as an alternative to traditional cpap treatment in select patients. Sleep medicine has an ongoing research study in conjunction with women's health evaluating the incidence of sleep apnea in pregnancy and participates in a multidisciplinary clinic with neurology to care for patients with progressive neuromuscular disease.7. Helwig/diabetes and metabolism center the diabetes and metabolism center (dmc) at lehigh valley health network (lvhn), is a program aimed at providing focused support and resources for patients with diabetes and other metabolic disorders. The pilot program at the center was to help primary care providers to rapidly escalate therapy for patients with uncontrolled diabetes mellitus type 2, as well as provide education support. We have expanded our focus to include patients with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes as well as added a pharmacist who works closely with patients in the endocrinology practice for medication optimization. We have recognized the importance of behavioral changes, so we added a lifestyle medicine physician available to discuss lifestyle changes outside of medication therapy as well as health coaches. Our team consists of certified diabetes educators, health coaches, physicians, advanced practice clinicians and pharmacists. The clinicians work collaboratively with primary care providers to assist with short-term medication titration and adjustments to optimize patient's a1c. Patients have regular appointments with apcs and pharmacist to have medications adjusted in a timely fashion. They also have regularly schedule education with a diabetes educator and a health coach if they choose. They also have access to online educational material. We use technology such as continuous glucose monitors to help support medication and lifestyle changes. As we expand the dmc, we hope to be able to provide urgent appointments from the emergency department and primary care to avoid ed visits and hospitalizations.