As you well know, there is growing awareness of the impact of chronic disease and our population’s health on the severity of the COVID symptom presentation and increased risk for hospitalization and mortality. This case series, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), shows that high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes were the most common comorbidities of hospitalized COVID-19 cases in New York between March 1-April 4, 2020. Furthermore, presence of those preventable diseases led to higher rates of mortality.

Our VMC Lifestyle Medicine clinics are perfectly positioned to be able to assist your patients in practicing healthy lifestyle behaviors to reduce their risk of these preventable disease states. This includes assisting them with their functional and exercise limitations due to injuries or dysfunctions, improving their nutrition habits or development of structured exercise programs. VMC is hoping to ramp up our focus on health optimization as we prepare for the long haul of this pandemic!

We know many of you have not had the opportunity to see our Lifestyle Medicine clinics or meet some of our care team. Since volumes may be slow to return to normal, we would love to invite you to visit one of our local Lifestyle Medicine locations and see the local resources available within the community to assist patients with health improvement and disease management. Our team can partner with you to develop a care plan tailored to the patient’s goals and reduce their risk of both COVID complications and long-term chronic disease progression.

Here is our flyer and web page outlining our Lifestyle Medicine programs as well as the referral information in EPIC to make this process as streamlined as possible.

We look forward to seeing you and collaborating with your patients to improve their health! Please reach out to me by email at Staci_Lyons@Valleymed.org if you have any questions or would like to meet up at the clinic for a tour.