Dr Brian Im: Rehab Medicine During COVID-19

Dr. Brian Im serves as director of brain injury rehabilitation at the Rusk Rehabilitation Institute at NYU Langone Health. He is heavily involved in program development and academic medicine. He has an active role in TBI research with a focus on studying health care disparities and differences that exist in traumatic brain injury care for different populations. After completing medical school at SUNY, Syracuse, a rehabilitation residency at NYU School of Medicine/Rusk Rehabilitation, and a fellowship in brain injury medicine at UMDNJ/Johnson Rehabilitation Institute, his subsequent tenure at Bellevue Hospital focused upon an interest in improving brain injury rehabilitation for underserved populations. In this episode, Dr Im discusses the kinds of patients he has been treating for COVID-19, after-effects that are caused or associated with the onset of coronavirus that might not have occurred in the absence of a COVID-19 infection; patterns that characterize these patients; when triage becomes necessary; whether any kinds of measures or rating scales are being used at Rusk as a means of helping to distinguish patients who can expect to be discharged to their homes compared to individuals with more life-limiting medical conditions; whether accurate predictors exist to help determine whether a patient’s condition may be prone to deteriorate rapidly as opposed to achieving recovery eventually from what ails them; if Rusk has access to all necessary therapies, including those considered still at an experimental stage of effectiveness; if wearing full-body PPE in the hospital results in physical barriers that hinder personal activities; ways is which his life has changed since the appearance of COVID-19; and whether telehealth plays a role in treating either patients who have been discharged after being treated for COVID-19 or patients who already were being treated by Rusk clinicians prior to the outbreak of that disease.