COVID-19: How One of Northern California’s Largest Health Systems is Responding to the Crisis

In this episode of the MGMA Insights podcast, we continue a series focused on COVID-19 and how it’s impacting healthcare professionals and their patients. Throughout this series, we’ll share conversations with experts regarding challenges such as staffing, communication, emergency preparedness, patient education, advocacy and more. You can keep up with the latest by visiting the MGMA COVID-19 Action Center at MGMA.com/covid. Our guest is Peter Valenzuela, MD, MBA, chief medical officer, Sutter Medical Group of the Redwoods. Here are a handful of highlights from his interview: - (6:54) “We actually have calls every morning at 7 a.m. with the local team, and it includes our managers and our physician leaders. We talk about whether there's any new cases, whether we have any PPE equipment or use that we've had, and then whether there's anybody out on furloughs or out on leave secondary to this COVID-19 situation. I think it's keeping everybody on the same level as far as what we're doing and what our plans are.” - (9:29) “We've actually been really good about being efficient with our equipment because we set up an actual COVID clinic, where we screen out patients who answer positively to the screening questions. … If they answer positively to those, we redirect them to a separate clinic that we have where we do nothing but COVID-19 screening. That has kind of helped shift those patients from our main care center sites to one area where we can control the use of the testing kits, as well as the PPE.” - (21:24) “I think that the benefit with the fires for us was that we knew that [it] eventually was going to come to an end and then we'd be able to start up again, and we were able to plan around the fire containment. With the COVID virus, it's different because it's so novel and we don't know when we're going to reach a peak and when it's going to come down.” MGMA Insights is presented by Decklan McGee, Rob Ketcham and Daniel Williams. Thanks to Biome, Midmark and SR Health by Solutionreach for sponsoring this episode of MGMA Insights. To learn about how the Biome solution, powered by artificial and augmented intelligence, can improve your cardiovascular service line’s performance today, visit biome.io/solutions. For more on how Midmark is transforming healthcare delivery through their real-time locating system, visit midmarkRTLS.com. You can also click here to check out Midmark’s recent on-demand webinar titled “Outpatient Design: Using Data to Improve Patient Access and Satisfaction,” which is eligible for ACMPE, ACHE and CEU credits. To explore how SR Health by Solutionreach can help improve your organization’s healthcare communication, visit srhealth.com. You can also click here to register for their upcoming MGMA seminar titled “Taking Patient Text Messaging to the Next Level with A.I. and Other Tech,” which is eligible for ACMPE, ACHE and CEU credits.