Cuomo: Creating 'One Health Care System' To Fight Coronavirus
NEW YORK STATE — Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday announced a new partnership between the state's private and public hospitals with the goal of creating a single hospital system to deal with the projected increase in coronavirus patients.
A new Central Coordinating Team will implement the state's new public-private hospital plan. It will allow the hospitals to share information, supplies, staff and even patients across the state. The team will be responsible for organizing upstate to downstate staffing, assisting Elmhurst Hospital and other stressed facilities, setting patient thresholds for hospitals; organizing patient transfers to other hospitals and other facilities; coordinating state/city stockpiles and individual hospital stockpiles and facilitating staffing recruitment.
"We have to get the private system and the public system working together in New York in a way they never had before," Cuomo said at his daily news conference on Tuesday. "The distinction between private and public hospitals has to go out the window. We're one health care system."
The team will be led by the state Department of Health and includes the Westchester, New York City and Long Island health care systems, the Greater New York Hospital Association and the Healthcare Association of New York State. The team will also work with FEMA and the federal government.
To help hospitals with staffing, Cuomo also announced that the state is launching a portal that will connect health care facilities with the nearly 80,000 health care workers who have volunteered to help during the coronavirus pandemic. It will help deploy workers to the facilities in greatest need. Volunteers could start working as early as Thursday.
"As we continue to battle the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have two missions: preparing our hospital system so it is not overwhelmed when the apex of the curve hits and ensuring people stay home so they don't get the virus in the first place," Cuomo said. "We are following the mathematical projections of the experts and preparing for the main battle at the apex by procuring as much equipment as we can, increasing our hospital capacity and supporting hospital staff. We met with the entire state hospital system for the first time ever and established an unprecedented new approach to work cooperatively as one unified, statewide health care system to defeat this virus. This virus does not discriminate — no one is immune to it — and people must continue to be cautious, think of others and not leave their homes unless absolutely necessary."
As of Tuesday morning, Cuomo said the state had 75,795 positive cases of the coronavirus, with the majority located in New York City. Across the state, 10,929 people have been hospitalized, and 4,975 are in intensive care. So far, there have been 1,550 deaths in New York.
This article originally appeared on the Long Beach Patch
