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Review
. 2020 Sep;35(9):2732-2737.
doi: 10.1007/s11606-020-05952-6. Epub 2020 Jul 13.

Harnessing the Power of Hospitalists in Operational Disaster Planning: COVID-19

Kasey Bowden  1   2 , Ellen L Burnham  2   3 , Angela Keniston  1   2 , Dimitriy Levin  1   2 , Julia Limes  1   2 , Jason Persoff  1   2 , Lindsay Thurman  1   2 , Marisha Burden  4   5
Affiliations
Review

Harnessing the Power of Hospitalists in Operational Disaster Planning: COVID-19

Kasey Bowden et al. J Gen Intern Med. 2020 Sep.

Abstract

Hospitalists are well poised to serve in key leadership roles and in frontline care in particular when facing a pandemic such as the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection. Much of the disaster planning in hospitals around the country addresses overcrowded emergency departments and decompressing these locations; however, in the case of COVID-19, intensive care units, emergency departments, and medical wards ran the risk of being overwhelmed by a large influx of patients needing high-level medical care. In a matter of days, our Division of Hospital Medicine, in partnership with our hospital, health system, and academic institution, was able to modify and deploy existing disaster plans to quickly care for an influx of medically complex patients. We describe a scaled approach to managing hospitalist clinical operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they do not have a conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Working framework for the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The tiered system for the management of COVID-19 pandemic.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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