Service line care delivery model for COVID-19 patient-centric care

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hospitals around the world to quickly develop not only strategies to treat patients but also methods to protect health care and frontline workers.

Descriptive study.

We outlined the steps and processes that we took to respond to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to provide our routine acute care services to our community.

These steps and processes included establishing teams focused on maintaining an adequate supply of personal protection equipment, cross-training staff, developing disaster-based triage for the emergency department, creating quality improvement teams geared toward updating care based on the most current literature, developing COVID-19-based units, creating COVID-19-specific teams of providers, maximizing use of our electronic health record system to allocate beds, and providing adequate practitioner coverage by creating a computer-based dashboard that indicated the need for health care practitioners. These processes led to seamless and integrated care for all patients with COVID-19 across our health system and resulted in a reduction in mortality from a high of 20% during the first peak (March and April 2020) to 6% during the plateau period (June-October 2020) to 12% during the second peak (November and December 2020).

The detailed processes put in place will help hospital systems meet the continuing challenges not only of COVID-19 but also beyond COVID-19 when other unique public health crises may present themselves.