Howard Finger

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT HOWARD FINGER

Howard J. Finger, D.O, is attending physician and clinical ethics consultant at Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center and at Henry J. Carter Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility. He was co-chairperson of the NYC Health + Hospitals Bioethics Council from 2019 to 2022. Currently, he serves on the board of direction of the Empire State Bioethics Consortium (ESBC) and is a member of the AMDA Ethics Subcommittee. In conjunction with the Bioethics Council, he developed an Algorithm for the Unbefriended to assist care teams in making end-of-life treatment decisions when patients lack both decisional capacity and surrogates, which he applied at Coler. He was lead author of three articles on the subject, the latest of which, “An Interdisciplinary Ethics Panel Approach to End-of-life Decision-Making for Unbefriended Nursing Home Residents,” was published in the 2022 summer issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics. For his work, Dr. Finger received the 2020 Foundation for Post-Acute & Long-Term Care Medicine’s Quality Improvement & Health Outcome (QIHO) Award for improving the quality-of-life for persons living in nursing homes. In the spring of 2020, Dr. Finger co-developed a COVID-19 Performance Improvement (PI) Bundle and served as PI team co-leader at Coler where it contributed to a large reduction in the COVID-19 infection fatality rate among its highly vulnerable resident population, which was reported in the Jan/Feb 2022 edition of the American Journal of Medial Quality, “Newly developed COVID-19 bundle greatly reduces the infection fatality rate for highly vulnerable nursing home population.” The PI bundle helped to address inequities in access to quality health care adversely impacting ethic-racial minorities, as the standard of care was elevated equally for all during the pandemic with promising outcome results. Dr. Finger later received the 2021 NYC Health + Hospitals Performance Improvement Champion Award for Post-acute Care for his work in this field. He and his PI team members are performing further research to address this vital issue with a follow-up article expected to be out later in 2023. In the fall of 2022, Dr. Finger, along with his PI team co-leaders, received the New York City Health + Hospital Excellence in Performance Improvement Award for Post-Acute Care for their PI project Reduction of Non-Beneficial Life-Sustaining Treatments in a Nursing Home Setting.