JUNE - 20218In My OpinionThe current COVID-19 public health emergency is impacting hospitals in unimaginable ways. One big lesson we have learned so far from this adversity is that if there can be anything positive that comes out of such a dreadful pandemic that even hospitals which historically struggled to react to and respond to rapid changes, found the capability to pull it together and change on a dime when a global health emergency necessitated it.One cannot underestimate the strain that hospitals have been under during the pandemic. Hospitals have had to take care of potentially super-contagious patients and surges of gravely ill patients. They have also had to ensure their frontline healthcare workers have access to all the personal protective equipment (PPE) that they need to protect themselves and the patients they are caring for. Hospitals have also had to quickly deploy an extraordinary number of critical care beds and alter nursing units' layout to accommodate the surge of very sick COVID patients. This involves many things, not the least of which is altering the airflow in hospital rooms, enhancing patient monitoring tools, and also involves a lot of restructuring of electronic health record systems, revenue cycle systems, and many other computer systems within the hospital.Those are some of the major changes impacting the "frontlines" at hospitals. Behind the scenes, a whole new world sprung up almost overnight. A "virtual world". Hospitals that never really had large-scale "work from home" (WFH) programs had to implement them in very short order, since regulatory agencies were strongly recommending to allow employees to work from home to the extent possible to minimize social contact and the possible spread of the COVID virus. While most hospitals have had "remote access" capabilities, those capabilities often were not meant to fully replace the "office desktop" experience. Additionally, hospitals may not have had the level of system capacity needed to support so many remote users simultaneously. Hospitals have had to scale up their remote-user offerings almost instantly, with an eye on a whole new set of cybersecurity risks inherent with remote access from personal computers over external connections. This was a major undertaking that many hospitals (ours included) did an amazingly good job. Workflows for remote employees had to change to ensure compliance with all aspects of HIPAA, going well SUBTLE AND NOT-SO-SUBTLE IMPACTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON HOSPITAL IT DEPARTMENTSRich Temple, Vice President, Chief Information Officer, Deborah Heart and Lung CenterByRich Temple
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