• Ashiq Mannan, Nick Sutingco, Svet Djurkovic, Mary Reyes, Mehul Desai, Soleyah Groves, Ivan Garcia, Wali Azizi, Andrew Miner, Sam Elgawly, Greg Trimble, Paul Weisbruch, Erik Osborn, Steven Dean, Maruf Haider, Madeline Erario, Patricia Horgas, Erin Hodson, Brian Lam, Jennifer Bautista, Andrei Racila, Andrej Kolacevski, Linda Henry, Stephen Motew, Chapy Venkatesan, Ann Huston, Naomi Lynn Gerber, J Stephen Jones, and Zobair M Younossi.
• Inova Medicine Services, Inova Health System, 3300 Gallows Rd, Falls Church, VA 22042. Email: zobair.younossi@inova.org.
• Am J Manag Care. 2022 Mar 1; 28 (3): e80-e87.

ObjectivesThe COVID-19 pandemic has caused hospitals around the world to quickly develop not only strategies to treat patients but also methods to protect health care and frontline workers.Study DesignDescriptive study.MethodsWe outlined the steps and processes that we took to respond to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to provide our routine acute care services to our community.ResultsThese steps and processes included establishing teams focused on maintaining an adequate supply of personal protection equipment, cross-training staff, developing disaster-based triage for the emergency department, creating quality improvement teams geared toward updating care based on the most current literature, developing COVID-19-based units, creating COVID-19-specific teams of providers, maximizing use of our electronic health record system to allocate beds, and providing adequate practitioner coverage by creating a computer-based dashboard that indicated the need for health care practitioners. These processes led to seamless and integrated care for all patients with COVID-19 across our health system and resulted in a reduction in mortality from a high of 20% during the first peak (March and April 2020) to 6% during the plateau period (June-October 2020) to 12% during the second peak (November and December 2020).ConclusionsThe detailed processes put in place will help hospital systems meet the continuing challenges not only of COVID-19 but also beyond COVID-19 when other unique public health crises may present themselves.

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