“We need to know the now,” says Dr. Matthias Merkel, as he shows off the technology.
Merkel is the founder of an Oregon Health & Science University project to track the availability of hospital beds and services across the state to help direct patients to care. He and his coworkers call the room at the project core “mission control,” a term popularized by NASA.
The newly remodeled space in the Kohler Pavilion on OHSU’s main campus is also home to the Oregon Medical Coordination Center, a collaboration between Oregon’s hospitals that recently received a federal grant.
OHSU officials said the center could serve as a model for other states as hospitals across the country face shortages of staffed beds and other resources.
If there’s a critical patient in a rural area who’s in need of more intensive care, Merkel said, “it allows us to be their spokesperson.”
The new facility puts the center’s staff and technology in one location. In a tour on Tuesday, coordinators sat hunched over computers to analyze incoming data. Monitors displayed dark grids of numbers, some of which splashed with bright green cells or peppered with red indicators.
Previously, if a patient needed services their nearest hospital could not provide, it meant calling other hospitals around the clock to find an open bed. But now it takes just several hours to find a bed for a critically ill patient, said Merkel who serves as the university’s senior associate chief medical officer for capacity management and patient flow.
Standing next to a monitor showing alerts for Portland area hospitals, Stephanie Gilliam, director of the control center, explained that it tracks whether a hospital is having a lockdown or other safety event.
As a result, surrounding hospitals are “all looking at the same data and coming up with a plan for all of our patients for the day,” she said.
The center also has data on scheduling of nurses and can help a hospital plan for its space needs, she said.
‘Put it on a whiteboard’
The project’s origins date back to 2016 when management realized they were struggling to meet patient demand, Merkel said.
“We were essentially in crisis intervention every single day trying to figure out what’s going on,” he said. “It took us two, three hours to get sort of a lay of the land. And by the time we put it on a whiteboard, it was really outdated.”
OHSU began working with GE Healthcare for a project in 2017 that began using real time data to coordinate care for patients at the four hospitals in its system.
Oregon has one of the lowest per-capita numbers of hospital beds in the country. When COVID-19 pandemic struck Oregon in 2020, OHSU began working with the Oregon Health Authority and other hospitals to share data on the availability of resources and open beds to direct patients accordingly during surges of infections. As part of that effort, Apprise Health Insights, the data subsidiary of the Hospital Association of Oregon, developed and operates what is now known as the Oregon Capacity System.
In 2021, OHSU created the Oregon Medical Coordination Center, which works with the health authority and other hospital systems to connect patients who need a higher level of care than what is available in their communities. Its use was on display during the “tripledemic” public health emergency in 2022 marked by increases in respiratory syncytial virus, COVID-19 and the flu.
Since then, the Oregon Legislature provided OHSU with $5.4 million to support ongoing efforts to track the number of behavioral health beds in the state. The center also recently received $4.5 million federal funds to prepare for disasters and other emergencies.
While helping create the program, Merkel said that he realized how much rural communities depend on inter-facility transfers to larger hospital systems that have more speciality care.
Traveling across the state for higher levels of care can be disruptive and costly for patients. That highlights another challenge that better hospital management can address, he said: “How do we get you back into your community earlier, so that you have a healing environment?”
- The Lund Report is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit, online news source covering health care issues in Oregon and southwest Washington.