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Hospital Execs: The Next Week Will Be Big

By Dennis Boone

A week into the stay-at-home directive from local governments, officials from the University of Kansas Health System said Tuesday morning that the coming week could be determinative in the fight against spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Steven Stites, the hospital’s senior vice president for clinical affairs, said that as of Monday night, the hospital had 30 patients admitted, 10 of them currently on ventilators. “What we pay attention to is the number of patients we have in the hospital,” he said. The lack of community-wide testing for the presence of COVID-19 in the larger population means that officials can’t know how much is out there. 
 
“The key for us what happens in the next week; that will be the tale of tape,” Stites said. “We’ve been practicing social distancing for eight days, but in the next week, we’re going to know how well it’s working.”
 
The hospital, he said, is working with other medical providers across the region and using models that under one scenario would fill half the region’s beds with COVID patients. “And we’d be OK with that,” he said. The alternative is a spike that requires more beds than are available in the market. “We have to work toward both possibilities,” he said, “because we don’t know what’s going on with the trends around distancing.”
 
Cell-phone data has shown significant increases in spacing between users in Johnson, Wyandotte and Jackson counties, but still not enough to demonstrate that people in the region are maintaining adequate spacing from one another in public. 
 
Stites was joined at the news conference by infectious-disease specialist Dana Hawkinson and by Rick Couldry, vice president of pharmacy operations for the hospital.
 
They addressed progress in securing new and more effective testing equipment, efforts to source more of that as well as personal-protective equipment for hospital staffers, and the community response in rallying to the battle–both from the health-are side and private business.
 
The latter have been instructive, Stites said, especially the hospital collaborations. Insitutions in this region have long had plans for mass casualties or epidemics, he said, but “having a plan and the reality is much different story. I will say that as a pandemic, this has helped forge new relationships across our city. KU and Saint Luke’s have talked more the last two weeks than the last two years.”
 
The region, he said, has “a lot of great doctors and great hospitals, and “it’s rewarding in the midst of a crisis to watch people pull together in common good do take care of patients. That spirit of cooperation is alive and well.”
 
In the past week, KU has hosted a teleconference for hospital executives in both Missouri and across Kansas to share information, “and prior to the pandemic, that never would have been true,” Stites said. “We’re all doing the same thing, trying to pass along information we think might be helpful for others, plan for what a surge may look like and how to respond.”
 
With that communication, data from all hospitals are compiled and offer real-time guidance to ambulance drivers, for example, to know which facility has beds available at the moment. 
 
Couldry cited area private businesses for their responses, including efforts to provide more testing materials. U.S. Engineering, for example, was able to fabricate stainless-steel tables in just four days, allowing the hospital to expand its testing facilities. And NorthPoint Development arranged for charter planes to fly engineers to Kansas City to  help with that expansion.
 
Taken together, Stites said, the collaborations were “a great sign of how people were working together to save lives.”