Vanderbilt University Medical Center has opened the Adult Post-Acute COVID Clinic. With no single location, the clinic is a coordinated service across adult general medicine and medical specialty clinics, with a telemedicine component to facilitate initial patient assessments in most cases. At the start of the pandemic, VUMC established a program to provide ready access to care for patients recovering at home from COVID-19. The new clinic provides additional resources for patients with lingering or late symptoms and is expressly for adults who have tested positive for COVID-19 with at least four weeks having passed since their diagnosis.

"Because there's been a large amount of discussion around what symptoms are attributable to long COVID, or post-acute COVID, for the time being it was best to focus this new program on those patients who have recently had confirmed acute disease," said Cecelia Theobald, MD, associate professor of Medicine and vice chair for Clinical Affairs in the Department of Medicine. "The new clinic serves in part to ensure that we provide a place to hear these patients and validate their experience as we learn more about this new syndrome."

According to the CDC, the most commonly reported long-term COVID-19 symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, cough, joint pain and chest pain with other lingering complications less commonly reported. Applicable services range from general medicine to cardiology, pulmonology, infectious diseases, physical medicine and rehabilitation, nephrology, dermatology, neurology and psychiatry.