ABSTRACT
The rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic required the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine to seek innovative solutions and review steps to meet patient care demands while maintaining quality and safety in the face of increased patient volumes, insufficient staff, and an evolving understanding of a highly infectious pathogen. Examples from a combination of actual disaster events and exercises include alternate site surge facilities, mobile field hospital deployment, federal resource activation, modified triage algorithms, load-sharing with regional systems, and conversion of nontraditional spaces.4 All of these strategies were implemented by our enterprise in the pandemic response, though provider redeployment from specialties outside of EM into the ED during a pandemic disaster was a unique opportunity without a blueprint. With government officials urging social isolation and a substantial increase in the number of patients electing to receive care by telemedicine, our virtual urgent care service was also identified as an area that required additional support. To ensure patients would continue to receive the highest quality medical care, the ED leadership developed a comprehensive orientation and onboarding process and operationalized the training, scheduling, shadow shifts, quality review, and feedback process for redeployed staff from neurosurgery, ophthalmology, neurology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, dermatology, internal medicine, colorectal surgery, gastroenterology, psychiatry, and others (see Table 1).