Ideas born from pandemic necessity continue to show value today - WIBW

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Friday, December 16, 2022

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - New approaches born from the COVID pandemic continue to prove valuable as hospitals now deal not only with COVID, but also an influx of flu, RSV and other patients.

The CDC’s latest update shows influenza at very high levels in Kansas and across much of the nation.

Busy emergency rooms are nothing new. They can be the window offering the fist glimpse at rising illness numbers. That’s why, in 2018, Stormont Vail emergency physician Dr. Clayton Wood wondered if the ER also could be a line of defense in keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

“We can’t shut the doors. We’re always open,” Dr. Wood said.

Dr. Wood came up with a proposal based on the what he describes as “right patient, right place right time.”

“Not every patient needs to be inpatient right now. Some people can be seen the next day or that evening,” he said. “It’s all about logistics and timing. They are sick - not discounting that one bit - but do they need our ICU, our step down unit right this second?”

His plan for what’s now dubbed a “command center” was put on the back burner until September 2020. When COVID patients started spiking, the ER got a call.

“How can you guys help us? We have limited resources. We have limited nursing. We have limited beds and they kind of went back to the proposal I’d written a couple years prior,” he said.

Dr. Wood’s approach directly involves a physician in the patient placement process. Dr. Wood estimates he now handles 40 to 50 calls a day, not just from hospitals requesting transfers, but also express cares, urgent cares and triage lines.

“The thing that it used to be is just hit the easy button - just send them to the ER, just send them to hospital. That would be great if we had unlimited resources, unlimited beds, but we don’t so I get consultants on the phone. I help them manage patients at their facilities until we can get them here, or they can go somewhere else,” Dr. Wood said.

Stormont’s command center compliments KDHE’s Mission Control, which is a statewide software developed during the pandemic helping hospitals identify who has beds available for transfers.

“On Mission Control, they’ll call us and say, ‘It looks like you guys have a bed. Can you take these people?’ and then I’ll get on the phone and have a full conversation (to) help determine where they need to go,” Dr. Wood said.

Dr. Wood says the system is based on mutual support among doctors, hospitals, practitioners and clinics, and becoming more efficient at utilizing all available resources.

“Probably the best outcome of this is we are facilitating things that would have been so much more difficult to happen before,” he said. “We’re just expediting all these out-patient service lines.”

Dr. Wood credits all levels of the hospital system for coming together to find solutions to challenges. He says the command center also empowers the outside clinics to take action for their patients.

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