Regional approaches can help hospitals absorb shock of COVID-19 surges
Writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM), hospitalist Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc, how hospitals change when communities experience a surge of COVID-19 cases. To help prevent the effects of future surges on patients, he proposed having hospitals coordinate their responses on a regional basis, developing 鈥渟hared rules for decision-making and processes to manage resource constraints鈥 as well as shared communication protocols. He gave the example of 40 Michigan hospitals that shared data during the pandemic and held weekly webinars to share strategies, and cited a of COVID-19 patient survival during surges, which provides 鈥減owerful motivation to move away from the status quo,鈥 when most hospitals faced the crisis on their own. (AIM , 7/6/21)