Hospitals & Hospital Associations
Challenge: Hospitals are at the center of the COVID-19 response, with some communities estimating the need to significantly expand hospital capacity. Hospitals must simultaneously address the needs of patients seeking care for COVID-19 symptoms, caring for those in ICUs while also addressing the needs of other patients. Unlike other emergencies, this pandemic requires extraordinary efforts to protect healthcare workers and access supplies through an overstretched supply chain.
Hospital Critical Issues – COVID-19
Hospitals must continue everyday operations while simultaneously addressing critical COVID-19 issues, including:
- Healthcare worker health and safety
- Healthcare worker emergency staffing capacities and shifting priorities (e.g. surgeons shifting from elective surgeries to emergency care or utilizing medical students)
- Supply chain needs including:
- Personal protective equipment (PPE)
- Ventilators
- Soap, hand sanitizer
- In-house arrangements for staff between shifts (sleeping, food, personal hygiene)
- COVID-19 signage
- Medical waste and other potentially harmful waste removal
- Enacting emergency governance/decision-making command centers, modifying existing emergency plans for COVID-19-specific critical issues
- Sifting through the multitude of new science and policy information and adapting practices and workflows daily, such as adding screenings and re-prioritizing triage protocols
- Implementing internal communication plans including plans for health protections for patients and healthcare workers and implementing effective escalation procedures
- Implementing external communication plans with public health officials, payors, community providers and the community at large
- Coordinating with regional health system response efforts
- Implementing testing and reporting of COVID-19 cases
- Setting up expanded hospital capacity and separate triage operations
- Accessing available emergency funding
- Estimate the financial impact of COVID-19 and emergency funding on hospital margins to inform strategy, operations and advocacy
- Understanding and maximizing the use of changes in reimbursement
- Utilizing technologies and virtual care to address multiple strategies (e.g. social distancing to stop the spread of the virus, access to timely medical expertise and consultation, communications with patients and family members)
Addressing the Critical Unfolding Needs of Hospitals
HMA has been supporting hospitals and hospital associations for decades. We are leveraging and shifting our expertise to address this COVID-19 response and adapting our tools to the current environment in real time to support hospitals and their stakeholders as they navigate the COVID-19 response.
At HMA, we have the contacts and expertise to best help you navigate this rapidly changing landscape. Let us help you today.
Ready to talk to an expert about COVID‑19 support?
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