Located in the Conventus medical office building on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the center accepts all patients regardless of insurance status
UBMD Internal Medicine has opened Western New York’s first Long COVID Center. Funded by a grant from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation with support from the University at Buffalo, the center is accepting all patients, whether they have insurance or not.
Staffed by providers and physicians at UBMD Internal Medicine who are faculty members at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, the UBMD Long COVID Center is open and seeing patients.
“The acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic may have, thankfully, passed, but there are countless stories of Western New Yorkers who are still experiencing a collection of symptoms from COVID,” said physician Allison Brashear, vice president for health sciences at UB, dean of the Jacobs School and president of UBMD Physicians’ Group. “The long COVID Center will put these individuals at the forefront and make the resources needed more accessible.”
The center serves everyone
“Our center welcomes everyone,” said Sanjay Sethi, MD, center co-director and professor and chief of the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at UBMD Internal Medicine and the Jacobs School.
The center’s ability to serve all patients, whether they have insurance or not, was made possible by funding from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of the most vulnerable New Yorkers.
Sethi added that a partnership between the center and the Buffalo Urban League is promoting outreach to Buffalo’s underserved communities, which have been hard hit by COVID-19 and by long COVID as well.
To help reduce barriers to care, costs of care including parking will be reimbursed for individuals with economic hardship.
“We are focused on providing a comprehensive assessment of patients who may have long COVID, many of whom feel they have been forgotten,” said Sethi. “Because of that, the initial visit will take significantly longer than a typical office visit so that we can take a full medical history and collect all relevant information from medical records.”
Each patient will then be discussed by a multidisciplinary team of UBMD Internal Medicine providers, occupational and physical therapists, and a social worker and community health worker from the Buffalo Urban League. Based on the review of all of the material, the team will use the information to determine which tests and management plans will be best to recommend to each patient.
Subsequent appointments will be scheduled based on the needs of each patient.
To schedule an appointment, contact nurse practitioner Trudy Stern at 716.323.0674.