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  Today in health IT as cases soar reinforcements are on the way. What is it's role? My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health it a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. We have a webinar coming up. Want you to take a look at that?

You can hit it on our website this week, health.com/. Register. What we're gonna do is we are going to take apart a ransomware event. We're gonna be talking to John Getty, who is the CIO for Sky Lakes Medical Center, and we're going to also be talking to Lee Milligan, who is the CIO for Asante Health, which is the Community Connect partner for.

You can register once again this week, health.com/register. I would love to have you join. Love to know what questions you would like to have answered, and we will try to get them. Talked about on the show. Alright, here is today's story. Reinforcements are on the way. Crisis teams are sent to hard hit covid hospitals in Oregon.

Oregon will deploy crisis teams of hundreds of nurses, respiratory therapists, paramedics, and nursing assistants to regions of the state's hardest hit. By the surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations that have stretched hospitals to the limit. Governor Kate Brown said Wednesday. The state has finalized a contract with medical staffing company that will send up to 500 healthcare providers to central and Southern Oregon where hospitals have been slammed by surge in coronavirus patients.

Most of them unvaccinated. Smaller teens will also head to long-term care facilities around the state. COVID-19 Hospitalizations have increased 990% in Oregon since July 9th. According to health officials, the personnel will head to Bend, Oregon, Redmond, Medford, Ashland Grants Pass and Roseburg and can move as conditions required.

Brown said the plan also calls for 60 additional nurses and clinical staff from providers AM and healthcare. But plans for where those medical workers will be has not been finalized. The deployments of crisis response teams should provide some welcome relief to our hospitals. Brown said, the hospital crisis we are facing isn't just about beds.

It's about having enough trained healthcare professionals to treat patients. Under the contract response teams will head to Central Oregon to support St. Charles health systems in Bend and Redmond. And to Southern Oregon to support Asante Hospitals in Medford, Ashland, and Grants Pass, as well as Providence Medford Medical Center and Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg.

The teams will be supported by up to 300 registered nurses in med surg. Emergency departments and critical care 20 paramedics, 61 certified nursing assistants, 34 respiratory therapists and five medical technicians according to a statement. So you get the picture, reinforcements are on the way, which is welcome.

I started thinking about that story and obviously this is today in health. It I, I start thinking about it from an IT perspective and we had similar challenges. We had strikes in Northern California and some other things where we had to bring in contract workers for a period of time, and so I just jotted down some of the things that I would be thinking about.

I. That health, it is really going to be leaned on at this point that they're gonna be required to do at this point in those facilities. So the first thing to consider, obviously, is account management. You've gotta be able to stand up new accounts, tear down accounts as people leave, and this will be a flute situation for a little bit of time.

I know that when I showed up as CIO at the health system where I was at in Southern California. It took us almost 25 to 30 days to spin up new accounts for people and that was just not going to cut it. And we did a lot of things to speed up that process, put some tools in place, and, uh, really a lot of process work to make sure that we could do that much more effectively.

In this case, you're not gonna have weeks to stand this up. You're gonna have . A day, and we got our processes down to hours. So as we were bringing in these contract workers, we were able to stand that process up and stand those new accounts up pretty quickly on that day, and also to tear down those accounts on the same day that people left.

This is also important, obviously, from a cybersecurity standpoint to make sure that those accounts get turned off. So the first is account management. Second thing is training. So you're bringing in a whole host of new people. There's training around a lot of things, right? So you want them to understand how to use the EHR and how to document effectively, or at least document as close as they can to the process that you're utilizing.

And the next thing is you can't overlook your cybersecurity practices. These people are gonna be on your network potentially. They will be on your network and if they are, they'll have accounts and they could potentially be responding to email and clicking on things they shouldn't. So you have to get them some cybersecurity training.

Now, hopefully the contract firm that's bringing them in will do some of that training before they show up, but if not, that's something that you want to make sure gets done as well as the documentation training. So account management training. I think the next thing is, uh, really a combination of education and analytics.

Health. It is such an integral part of telling this story and the, the story gets told through numbers and I've seen some really excellent posts recently on social media that takes advantage of the analytics that we have. Puts those in a graphical form and then puts them out on social media. And when you look at that, you can see, for example, Lee Milligan has been putting out this.

Graphic that they have been developing at Asante Health, which is one of the health systems that is being overrun right now with covid patients, and it gives us a daily count of what's going on. It tells us how many vaccinated versus unvaccinated, and roughly the vaccinated is roughly 15%, and which means that the unvaccinated is 85%.

That tells a story in and of itself. So people can see that in a social media post in the local newspaper. So I think one of the things health IT can do is tell the story through analytics, tell it effectively through analytics and graphics. And I think the other thing is to work effectively with marketing to get that story told in its many places as possible.

I've started to see some really effective . Education post one from a health system out of Lubbock, Texas actually had the five most common fears that people have with getting the vaccine and the answers to those fears on the right side. I. And so I think those things are effective. I think that's part of it's role.

So as I go back through this with training on using the systems, account management and then analytics and telling the story, those were just a couple things I jotted down as I was reading this story. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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Thanks for listening. That's all for now.