Nursing students help city hospitals with COVID-19 telehealth efforts

When NYU Meyers alumna Natalia Cineas — the chief nurse executive of NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system — put out a call for help with COVID response, her alma mater was at the ready.

More than 230 nursing students in the Leadership & Management course and 20 faculty sprung into action to provide COVID-19 tests results via phone and assist with remotely monitoring patients.

“Our students, alongside their clinical instructors, called approximately 600 patients who had been tested for COVID-19. Using best practices and a toolkit that was given to us, we communicated with patients whether they tested positive or negative for the virus, and counseled them on what to do. We also used interpreter services as necessary,” said Sandy Cayo, clinical assistant professor at NYU Meyers and coordinator of the Leadership & Management course. Cayo liaised with NYC Health + Hospitals to get faculty and students access to electronic health records in a mere four days.

Now students and faculty are shifting their efforts to a home monitoring program for patients who have been discharged from the emergency department. Working with David Silvestri, an emergency medicine physician at NYC Health + Hospitals, students are calling patients at home to see how they are doing and to encourage them to sign up for a text message-based program, which provides daily text check-ins with patients.