Today is April 17, which means we have been in full-blown “pandemic mode” for just about five weeks. Our emergency response preparations actually began Jan. 27, but it was on March 17 that we officially started postponing all elective, non-urgent health care appointments and procedures to free up bed space, preserve personal protective equipment and comply with recommendations from state and national public health agencies.
The peak of our COVID-19 patient care activity appears to be sometime in the next two weeks – as soon as a few days from now. What happens after that is contingent on a number of crucial factors, including widespread availability of testing and contact tracing, antibody testing and related processes to determine who has had the disease and is functionally immune, and ultimately, the development of a vaccine.
Consistent with state-level guidance, we have begun planning how we will “restart” our normal operations and continue caring for smaller numbers of COVID-19 patients while resuming a business-as-usual stance in our overall operations. I hope we’ll have a better understanding of the timeline for all that over the next few days.
Even while we have been hunkering down and responding to conditions on the ground, I’ve been thinking about how life has changed during the pandemic. Like any crisis, COVID-19 has pushed us to do things we didn’t know we were capable of doing. It has forced us to adapt and adopt, to think differently and to act differently.
So here is my list of things we didn’t know we could do, or hadn’t fully embraced, but now will do more of or do differently:
Tele-meetings. We certainly had been using Webex, Zoom, Facetime and other platforms to conduct meetings with virtual participation before the pandemic, but these tools have become second nature to us now and I expect almost every meeting of any size will likely have a virtual component going forward.
Hand hygiene. Over several years of rigorous surveillance and awareness efforts, we elevated our aggregate hand hygiene compliance to above 80 percent, with a corresponding reduction in nosocomial infections. This experience with COVID-19 has made all of us much more intentional about hand hygiene and probably pushed our compliance closer to 100 percent. My hope and expectation is that this habit will carry over.
YouTube livestreams. I’ll conduct my third COVID-19 virtual town hall meeting at noon today – this one on the topic of the pandemic’s impact on our education programs. It’s clear that this communication tool will become part of our portfolio to help everyone share information and stay informed. (Watch today’s livestream here.)
Stand up a drive-thru testing site, then repeat it across the state on a couple of days’ notice. This is one of those areas where we “stepped up,” because organizing a testing site was not in our job description or something we had ever done. But it needed to be done for our state, so we partnered with the Department of Health and did it, and my guess is we haven’t seen the end of this mode of health care service delivery.
Mobile telehealth app. We had been working with C Spire for some time and had jointly marketed the C Spire Health app - and we have our own UMMC-2-You app - but the opportunity to reconfigure the C Spire app and deploy it as a screening tool to schedule testing appointments was a case of right time/right place that has accelerated consumer acceptance of this technology.
Make telehealth more integral to our clinical practice. We’ve been national leaders in telehealth for some time, but in most cases it has seemed like a separate service line from our other ambulatory activities. This crisis has compelled us to shift many ambulatory appointments and screening activities to a telehealth format. Our patients like it and telehealth services have a lower cost structure than conventional office visits.
Create a labor pool, the UMMC Reserves. We’ve formed labor pools before to respond to operational disruptions, including for Hurricane Katrina, but the UMMC Reserves has set a new standard, matching hundreds of idled employees into new, temporary roles in just a few weeks.
Don’t have that? No problem, we’ll build it. From developing our own laboratory tests for COVID-19 to inventing a fully functioning, emergency-use ventilator to assembling clinical specimen kits that were in short supply to launching a website that’s matching employee needs with people who can supply a service, we have shown that when something is needed that we don’t have and can’t get, we will do it ourselves, usually in record time. This resourcefulness is not a surprise to me, but I think we’ve all been impressed at how quickly we have been able to solve these and many other problems and get solutions in place.
Class canceled? How about Pandemic 101? Although classes were put on hold after Spring Break, that doesn’t mean the learning stopped. Our students have been involved in a range of support activities that have provided hands-on experience, and we even started a course on disaster management to give students this once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) learning opportunity.
Organize eight clinical trials in about a month. Clinical trials are part and parcel of our research mission, but to open this many trials of novel treatments for COVID-19 this quickly is unprecedented in our experience.
Finally, I didn’t know that we could appeal to people and businesses in our community and across the state for personal protective equipment and other needs and that Mississippians would respond with an outpouring of donated equipment, hand-sewn surgical masks, meals for our front-line heroes and loving appreciation for the role UMMC is playing in this time of crisis.
I didn’t know, but am not surprised, because Mississippians are such giving people and they are pretty good at knowing who’s got their back. We do. #UMMCStrong
The peak of our COVID-19 patient care activity appears to be sometime in the next two weeks – as soon as a few days from now. What happens after that is contingent on a number of crucial factors, including widespread availability of testing and contact tracing, antibody testing and related processes to determine who has had the disease and is functionally immune, and ultimately, the development of a vaccine. 