By JENNA SITEMAN | Intern
Since 2000, The Cypress Center has offered high-quality physical therapy as well as private Pilates instruction and other wellness-maintaining services in Pacific Palisades. And now, while navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, the center is delivering new techniques to administer its care.
Some of these services include orthopedic, post-surgical and sports rehabilitation; pelvic health maintenance; custom orthotic evaluation and casting; vestibular rehabilitation; balance and neuromuscular rehabilitation; and Pilates and yoga-based rehabilitation programs.
The Cypress Center is utilizing telemedicine, and all of their therapists, owners Rachel Clark and Samantha Wood shared, are trained in physical therapy telehealth. They are using a HIPAA-compliant platform and want their patients to know that Medicare and most commercial insurers are now covering this service.
“At the end of March when we closed our doors to help flatten the curve, we initiated telehealth,” Wood said. “We were able to move our care to a new world that we hadn’t [been in] yet. And we began to see that we could definitely help the patients that really still needed our care.”
They are also offering a unique service where the center can dispatch physical therapists to clients in the area to treat them in their homes. The option of receiving in-home physical therapy visits allows patients who are not yet comfortable re-entering the facility or those unable to access telehealth services a way to not forgo essential treatments.
As the center begins to open its doors again, Clark and Wood stressed their devotion to exceed CDC precautions. They have implemented certain protocols to protect patients and therapists, such as a pre-appointment health screening, temperature monitoring of everyone in the facility, staggered appointments, appropriate physical distancing, and thorough cleaning and sanitizing of equipment and surfaces.
“We are now doing in-clinic visits,” Clark said, “and we hope that everyone feels very safe and comfortable coming to us because we’re compliant [with] CDC guidelines and we’ve implemented safety protocols.”
Clark and Wood also shared that as a center that has always focused on individualizing care for their patients, each patron has always been placed in their own room during treatment. Each room is equipped with all equipment a therapist could want to utilize, so The Cypress Center need not worry about germs being passed around on communal equipment because of their devotion to delivering a personalized treatment plan.
“We are a little unique in the PT clinic field, because we only do one-on-one physical therapy with just a physical therapist and a patient for an hour,” Clark said. “We believe that this is the highest standard of care and it really wasn’t hard to change our clinic design because of this. All of our patients are assigned their own room with their therapists and so the equipment exceeds the physical distancing requirements.”
In regards to the center’s Pilates instruction, Clark and Wood discussed the positive feedback they have been receiving from customers. Similar to many exercise platforms that have been using Zoom services as of late, their private Pilates instruction has continued to be a favorite of their customers—even some who were very hesitant of the new format.
“We’ve always done one-on-one Pilates,” Wood said. “All of our instructors are very comfortable working with injuries and they are trained specifically in that. So from mid-March to mid-June, we were doing all of our Pilates sessions via Zoom and now we probably have about 25% of our Pilates clients that don’t feel comfortable returning [to the studio] so there’s still many sessions via Zoom.”
As The Cypress Center celebrates its 20th year in business, it is only fitting that it adapt with finesse to the current climate of the community and aid in ensuring the health of all clients and employees.
“I think what we really want to get out there [to the community]” Wood said, “are our new ways that we’ve adapted to this climate to make everyone as safe as possible, and that they are comfortable and able to get the care that they need.”
The Cypress Center is located at 860 Via De La Paz in Suite B-1. For more information, call 310-573-9553 or visit thecypresscenter.com.
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