A PATH TO RESUME AESTHETIC CARE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF PROJECT AesCert™ GUIDANCE SUPPLEMENT: PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS...

This Project AesCert™ Guidance Supplement ("Guidance Supplement") was developed in partnership with a multi-disciplinary panel of board-certified physician and doctoral experts in the fields of Infectious Disease, Immunology, Public Health Policy, Dermatology, Facial Plastic Surgery and Plastic Surgery. The Guidance Supplement is intended to provide aesthetic medicine physicians and their staffs with a practical guide to safety considerations to support clinic preparedness for patients seeking non-surgical aesthetic treatments and procedures following the return-to-work phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, once such activity is permitted by applicable law. Many federal, state and local governmental authorities, public health agencies and professional medical societies have promulgated COVID-19 orders and advisories applicable to health care practitioners. The Guidance Supplement is intended to provide aesthetic physicians and their staffs with an additional set of practical considerations for delivering aesthetic care safely and generally conducting business responsibly in the new world of COVID-19. Aesthetic providers will face new and unique challenges as government stay-at-home orders and related commercial limitations are eased, and the U.S. economy reopens and healthcare systems transition from providing only urgent and other essential treatment to resuming routine care and elective procedures and services. The medical aesthetic specialties will therefore wish to resume practice in order to ensure high quality, expert care is available, and importantly to help promote patients' positive self-image and sense of well-being following a lengthy and stressful period of quarantine. In a number of areas, this Guidance Supplement exceeds traditional aesthetic office safety precautions, recognizing reduced tolerance in an elective treatment environment for any risk associated with COVID-19's highly variable presentation and unpredictable course. The disease has placed a disturbing number of young, otherwise healthy patients in extremis with severe respiratory and renal failure, stroke, pericarditis, neurologic deficits and other suddenly life-threatening complications, in addition to its pernicious effects on those with pre-existing morbidities and advanced age. Accordingly, the Guidance Supplement seeks to establish an elevated safety profile for providing patient care while reducing, to the greatest extent reasonably possible, the risk of infectious processes to both patients and providers. While the Guidance Supplement cannot foreclose the risk of infection, nor serve to establish or modify any standards of care, it does offer actionable risk-mitigation considerations for general office comportment and for certain non-surgical procedures typically performed in aesthetic medical settings. It is axiomatic that all such considerations are necessarily subject to the ultimate judgment of each individual healthcare professional based on patient situation, procedure details, office environment, staffing constraints, equipment and testing availability, and local legal status and public health conditions.