2. Partner with referring hospitals
Health systems with centers of excellence (COE) for stroke or trauma often admit patients from a large geographic area, typically after a referral from a physician in a community hospital that lacks specialty physicians or equipment. These referral networks could be leveraged during COVID-19 for “reverse” transfers, where a health system would send a patient back to the community hospital for an elective procedure and have the COE physicians and any needed equipment travel there so the procedure could be performed. Using this strategy, the health system and the community hospital could share in the revenue and the patient would not need to wait even longer for surgery.

3. Drop the competitive boundaries

Some states—such as Arizona—are uniting all hospitals and health systems, including competitors, through a single access center during the pandemic to ensure an adequate number of beds, providers, equipment and supplies of PPE. These access centers provide real-time updates on capacity so decisions to transfer patients are made quickly and patient loads are balanced between hospitals. By having this information at their fingertips, health systems across the state can make data-driven decisions about whether elective surgeries and other procedures should be canceled or postponed. In Arizona, given the surge in patients they have been facing in the month of June, it makes sense to do so in some cases.

In addition, why stop at state borders? When one metropolitan area experiences a surge, there are likely many empty beds and vacant surgical suites in other states waiting for a surge that has already happened or might not occur for weeks. Thousands of airline flights are still taking off every day. If patients are willing to travel, they could be tested for COVID-19 before travel and upon arrival. If negative, the surgery could occur as planned.

A timely, broad perspective into facility capacity and provider availability is necessary to make these clinical decisions. Unfortunately, too many health systems operate in siloed environments, which means that identifying bed vacancies, equipment and PPE supplies and provider capacity involves many phone calls to multiple clinicians and departments. Other health systems have little or no visibility into patient transfer traffic or why transfers were canceled, which prevents them from identifying opportunities for improvement.

Lack of interoperability within health systems and across communities is a significant problem. Data is not effectively shared between organizations, so much so that the White House Coronavirus Task Force required hospitals and health systems to share information daily about capacity and utilization—not through automated data feeds and application integration, but rather through offline spreadsheets.

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