Covid-19 threatens to hospitalize an exponentially increasing number of patients in the coming weeks. In addition to building more physical space and finding more equipment, what happens when we run out of hospitalists to manage their care? What if, instead of our usual 10 teams of hospitalists, we need 20 teams? Thirty simultaneous teams?
Thanks to CT for the guest-blogging spot. I’m a physician / programmer working at the University of Colorado and UCHealth, helping our system prepare for the Covid-19 crisis.
Seeing the the massive surges in patient volume related to the Covid-19 pandemic that befell our colleagues in China, Europe and New York, we knew that we would have to find “surge capacity” among providers in our area.
We guessed that outpatient docs (like CT and me) would be needed to support the inpatient service, where neither of us have been for a long time.
I for one, was relatively panicked by the thought of serving on the inpatient service. Not only is it a different branch of medicine at this point, more than a decade from my training years, but from an informatics perspective, the workflow is completely different. I figured that if someone with my (relatively high-level) of comfort with the Epic EHR was feeling stress, others would be as well.
So roughly four weeks ago, I reached out to my informatics colleague on the inpatient service and suggested that we leverage our existing training videos to quickly produce a comprehensive written and video guide to the inpatient service, targeted at these likely recruits.
He and I, together with three other hospitalists, another outpatient internist and an informatics neurologist, quickly compiled a comprehensive document of workflow and tips.
- Original Document hosted at Epic’s user web (login required) https://userweb.epic.com/Thread/96671/Inpatient-Guide-for-Outpatient-Doctors/
- Public document is here for all others.
We were gratified to find that a large number of internists practicing outpatient (clinic) medicine were willing to serve as part of the Surge teams and were interested in this just-in-time training.
There was so much interest in our training tools (document plus embedded videos) that the University of Colorado General Medicine division re-arranged the Grand Rounds schedule, and we presented this material to 150 interested outpatient internists at this week’s Grand Rounds, held by Zoom meeting.
We are so grateful that our cross-specialty relationships and shared technical expertise that are unique to informatics allowed us to create and present this material in a matter of days. Our wish:
- That our surge of hospital patients is manageable
- That our hospitalists stay safe and healthy
- That any outpatient providers who are called to duty stay safe and healthy
- We are grateful for the role we’ve played, and will continue to play
I hope that you can benefit from these documents. However, the longer view and greater message is the value of a strong informatics team which is uniquely positioned to rapidly mobilize and meet unforeseen needs.
Richard Altman, MD
