Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hospitals around the world to quickly develop not only strategies to treat patients but also methods to protect health care and frontline workers.
Study design: Descriptive study.
Methods: We outlined the steps and processes that we took to respond to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to provide our routine acute care services to our community.
Results: These steps and processes included establishing teams focused on maintaining an adequate supply of personal protection equipment, cross-training staff, developing disaster-based triage for the emergency department, creating quality improvement teams geared toward updating care based on the most current literature, developing COVID-19-based units, creating COVID-19-specific teams of providers, maximizing use of our electronic health record system to allocate beds, and providing adequate practitioner coverage by creating a computer-based dashboard that indicated the need for health care practitioners. These processes led to seamless and integrated care for all patients with COVID-19 across our health system and resulted in a reduction in mortality from a high of 20% during the first peak (March and April 2020) to 6% during the plateau period (June-October 2020) to 12% during the second peak (November and December 2020).
Conclusions: The detailed processes put in place will help hospital systems meet the continuing challenges not only of COVID-19 but also beyond COVID-19 when other unique public health crises may present themselves.