Regional approaches can help hospitals absorb shock of COVID-19 surges

Writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM), hospitalist Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc, described how hospitals change when communities experience a surge of COVID-19 cases. To help prevent the effects of future surges on patients, he proposed having hospitals coordinate their responses on a regional basis, developing “shared rules for decision-making and processes to manage resource constraints” as well as shared communication protocols. He gave the example of 40 Michigan hospitals that shared data during the pandemic and held weekly webinars to share strategies, and cited a study of COVID-19 patient survival during surges, which provides “powerful motivation to move away from the status quo,” when most hospitals faced the crisis on their own. (AIM editorial, 7/6/21)