OAHHS Hospital Voice Fall/Winter 2020

24 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. manage and get in front of this pandemic. Describe the process and the collaboration with OHA and whether there was ever any decision to be made on how forthcoming to be with this data. Transparency has been incredibly important during this pandemic. It’s important for the public to under- stand the trajectory of the pan- demic. OHA has gotten some criticism, but I think overall they’ve done a good job in being transparent with the public. We’ve worked collaboratively with OHA to try to provide the data that goes into some of those reports. That sounds like an easy thing. Data’s super easy, until you try to do it, and then you realize the complexity of trying to provide good, valid data that is consistent over time. And so we’re continuing to work with OHA on refining, improving, and creating better systems for reporting that data to OHA so OHA can report it to the public. There’s been strong collabora- tion with OHA on that. But I want to highlight some other areas of collaboration. I think this pandemic has really shown how hospitals and other community partners can pull together to respond to events like pandemics or natural disasters. There’s been tremendous regional collaboration between hospitals whether that’s in moving patients, talking about preparedness, or making sure that patients who need it have Remdesivir, which is one of the few drugs we know that can be helpful. There have been new oppor- tunities for collaboration, and strengthening of existing partner- ships through this pandemic, that I think will serve us well in the future. I’m always trying to look at the things that are positive and how can we build on those things moving forward. I think the type of collabo- ration we’ve seen between hospitals and the state is something we can build on for the future. It seems there have been a lot of examples of hospitals being very nimble and embracing new things by necessity during this period. What are some of those examples that you can talk about? The most striking example is tele- health and how rapidly hospitals, especially in the clinic environment, moved from almost every visit being in person to almost every visit be done via telemedicine. We all knew the promise of telemedicine, but it really took this event to accelerate that transformation. And I think there are patients who are happy that they don’t have to go sit in the doctor’s office anymore. There is efficiency through telemedicine, but there are still regulatory and pay- ment barriers that we’ll have to work through if we’re going to keep hold of that progress. That’s just one example of how hospitals moved quickly. Another was at the beginning of the pandemic we didn’t know if and when our hospitals would be at capacity. Some very rapid surge planning had to go on: everything from how do you quickly turn another unit into an ICU, how do you expand inpatient hospital beds into alternate facilities, whether that was an outpatient facility or something else, to how do you triage patients outside of the emergency department to minimize the contact that people have with each other? Those things all happened incredibly quickly, and it was impressive to see how hospitals responded in that time frame. I’ve been super impressed with many of the hospitals both inside and outside the metro area by their planning not necessarily just for this event exactly but by their ability to react to something like this. Hospitals are always planning for catastrophic events because if you have a natural disaster or a huge accident, the hospital must be prepared to see significant increases in volume. There’s an element of disaster preparedness that is always going on within hospitals. I think what was particularly impressive about this pandemic was that it was not responding to an event where something happened and then it was over and we move into recovery mode. This is about how we manage this pandemic on a go-forward basis for however long it takes until we can return to some sense of nor- malcy. In a sense, this is built on lessons learned from other types of natural disaster preparedness, but it’s really at a different level because it has to be a sustained response and has to I’m always trying to look at the things that are positive and how can we build on those things moving forward. I think the type of collaboration we’ve seen between hospitals and the state is something we can build on for the future.