Regional Hospital Coordinating Center: A Charleston Best Practice AD | 02.05.2007 | 09:22:11 | Views: 7143 | ID: Regional Hospital Coordinating Center (RHCC) is an important element in multi-jurisdictional or multi-agency domestic incident management. It provides guidelines to enable agencies, in this case Hospitals with different legal, geographic, and functional responsibilities to coordinate, plan, and interact effectively. As a team, the Regional Hospital Coordinating Center overcomes much of the inefficiency and duplication of effort that can occur when agencies from different functional and geographic jurisdictions, or agencies at different levels of government, operate without a common system or organizational framework. In a RHCC structure, the individuals designated by their Hospitals jointly determine objectives, plans, and priorities and work together to execute them. 1. What is the name of your best practice? Regional Hospital Coordinating Center
2. Describe your best Practice. During a disaster, a unified approach to medical command provides rapid facilitation of patient triage and placement in appropriate facilities, coordinates with local, regional, state and federal initiatives, and helps ensure a stable medical infrastructure. The RHCC would become the coordination and communication point for the regions healthcare community. By having a single point of contact for the hospitals, eliminates duplicate requests for information from multiple agencies. Information could then be provided from the RHCC on the status of all hospitals to other command centers, including state and federal. Coordinating patient placement through direction to EMS from a single site based on hospital capability, capacity, current patient volumes and patient needs prevents any single hospital from becoming overwhelmed. A coordinated patient focused collaborative healthcare response will decrease the overall burden of healthcare delivery to all healthcare providers, patients and families. 3.Is your best practice a new idea or how long has it been practiced in your community? How did your best practice originate? New idea for our community that can best be summed up by the statement in the HICS (Hospital Incident Command System) Guidebook: 4.8.2 Regional Hospital Coordination Centers Growing numbers of communities are developing a regional concept to coordinate hospital information-sharing and medically related resource management during a crisis. Sometimes called Regional Hospital Coordination Centers (RHCC), they are staffed by trained personnel (often senior or midlevel hospital personnel or administrators from the local/state hospital association) and operate from a well equipped area within a designated hospital (not in the Hospital Command Center), separate private facility, or local EOC. Their role and responsibilities should be well-defined and closely integrated with ESF8 – Health and Medical Services, in the local EOC. 4.Does your best practice require any new funding or can it utilize existing community resources? Each participating agency is providing assets, however, additional funding could be used to standardize equipment, retrofit the location for both natural and man-made disasters. 5.What barriers need to be removed for ideal implementation? Overcoming the "politics" of competing hospitals within the region. 6. What steps could be taken to improve the existing process or solution?
Not sure, since we are still in the very beginning stages of developing specific guidelines and testing the conceptual model during exercises. 7. Who are the key participants in this best practice and what are their roles? Representation from the following: East Cooper Hospital Medical University of SC Hospital Roper St Francis Healthcare Trident Health Systems SC Region 7 DHEC Public Health Preparedness Charleston Navy Clinic (optional) Charleston Air Force Base (optional) Charleston VA (optional) Qualifications of Representation: ·Completion of IS 100, 200 and 700 ·Functional knowledge of bed control process/policies ·Working knowledge of HosCap Website ·Working knowledge START Triage ·Ability to make command decisions for their facility/system and direct access to facility command staff 8. What technologies are needed to support implementation? Computers with internet access (hardwired, wireless and satellite service) Telephones (Cellular, land lines, Satellite) Radios-Portable and base stations for Palmetto 800 system and Ham Disaster tracking software for patients and the actual event, including server capacity 9. What is the most unique aspect of your solution? Hospital community coming together to provide a coordinated patient focused collaborative healthcare response to disaster. 10. What 3 steps would another community take to implement your solution? 1. Non-hospital entity such as the public health preparedness coordinator or the counties Emergency Support Function 8 Representative should convene regular meetings with the hospital groups in the region. 2. Must have buy in from upper hospital administration. 3. Hospital group who has the vision to see the forest rather than the trees.
Submitted By: Jerry W. Flury RN BSN MBA Director Emergency Management/Life Link Roper St Francis Healthcare Office: 843 724-2026/ 843 402-1112 Cell: 843 343-8406 Pager: 843 219-1275
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