Podcast Interview with CIO Michael Mistretta, Part 2: “Everyone Has Taken Ownership.”

“Strategy went out the window, frankly.”

In healthcare IT, where anything from a hurricane to an expected outage can disrupt operations, disaster preparedness is critical. Leaders want to know what to expect, and how they can best react. It’s precisely why Virginia Hospital Center works with groups like FEMA to run drills — so that everyone from network engineers to nurses know what to do in the event of, say, a terrorist attack.

What VHC — along with every other organization in the country — has learned, however, is that when a global pandemic hits, strategy goes out the window. “Nothing can prepare you for something of this magnitude and duration,” said Mike Mistretta, who has served as CIO since 2015. Luckily, his team did have the ability and willingness to pivot quickly, and immediately took steps to be able to accommodate the surge in patients while protecting caregivers.

In a recent interview, Mistretta talked about how VHC pieced together a Covid-19 response (including setting up the area’s first drive-through testing center), what he believes will be the biggest challenge as facilities reopen, and what he would’ve done differently, given the opportunity.

Part 1

Part 2



* Looking ahead – “Surge planning is something we’ve gotten good at.”

* Staff’s “incredible” level of responsiveness & productivity while working remotely

* VHC’s drive-through testing site

* Working with the county – “It all came together within a week”

* “True partners” versus vendors

* Dealing with bandwidth issues

* “Ahead of the curve” with dual-factor authentication

* Preparing for a possible second spike – “We’ll be better prepared.”



LISTEN HERE USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR SUBSCRIBE THROUGH YOUR FAVORITE PODCASTING SERVICE. 



Bold Statements

We really were doing builds overnight. The responsiveness and the productivity that the staff has been able to maintain while working remotely has been pretty incredible in my mind.

If you have good relationships with your vendors and you have true partners, they’re more than willing to come out and say, ‘How can I help?’

There’s no crystal ball, unfortunately. If we’ve done solid planning, that’s what’s going to carry us forward in the future in areas like telemedicine that were extremely accelerated during this period.

We don’t have to worry about whether it’s the right person accessing our systems. We know pretty definitively that it is. Again, some of the prior initiatives we put in place have paid dividends.

 

Gamble:  As you’re going through all of this, I imagine it’s helping to create a roadmap, whether it’s for a second surge or something similar, based on knowledge gained from Covid-19.

Mistretta:  Surge planning is something we’ve gotten pretty good at. The flexing of different nursing units, things like that. My teams had to go out and change rooms from single occupancy to semi-private rooms to get capacity. We’ve converted labor and delivery rooms to negative air pressure Covid-19 rooms — different things like that where facilities does something and then our team jumps in.

We really were doing builds overnight. The responsiveness and the productivity that the staff has been able to maintain while working remotely has been pretty incredible in my mind. Literally, we would get on a 4 o’clock COVID call, and people would ask, ‘Can we get this data and this report so we know what’s going on...