Looking Back: 5 Years Since The Start of COVID-19

Five years ago on February 28, 2020, EvergreenHealth's Kirkland campus became the first hospital in the U.S. to respond to the first known cases of community spread of COVID-19. This marked the beginning of the global pandemic in the U.S., and while little was known about the virus at the time, EvergreenHealth's providers, nurses and entire hospital system staff were ready and stepped up to the challenge.

In the following days, EvergreenHealth quickly developed numerous new protocols and systems, many of which were developed in partnership with and adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As new information about the virus was discovered, our providers and staff continued to lead the way in evolving and updating best practice approaches, which were then adopted in other health care settings across the country.

Many of those best practices stemmed from decisions made in EvergreenHealth's Incident Command Center, based on the National Incident Command System model, which our leaders had developed as part of ongoing training and their continued effort to be prepared for any crisis. For more than a decade prior to the pandemic, EvergreenHealth invested in sending our team members every year to the Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston, Alabama, where they participated in intensive crisis response training that informed many of the critical steps the health system took in addressing COVID-19.

"Since then, we've continued to expand and improve access to care, implementing what we learned as an organization and as an industry during the COVID-19 pandemic—which will undoubtedly benefit us in meeting the needs of our growing community," said EvergreenHealth CEO Ettore Palazzo, MD, who was the hospital system's chief medical and quality officer at the outset of the pandemic.

EvergreenHealth's experience as one of the first hospitals to navigate the pandemic was featured extensively by media, including coverage in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, CNN, NPR and dozens of other publications and outlets.

Francis Riedo, MD, the medical director of EvergreenHealth Infectious Disease department, was one of the many staff members who participated in media coverage while at the same time helping lead our hospital system in its response to the pandemic.

"What stood out to me, particularly at [EvergreenHealth], was the way people pulled together," he said. "We had the great benefit of being nimble and responsive with enough resources to really take care of people who were sick."

The media stories chronicled our initial steps, laying a strong foundation for a comprehensive approach to the pandemic for the months and years to come. Today, those developments that served our community through the pandemic have helped prepare us in the event of another public health crisis:

Handbook of Clinical Pearls

The EvergreenHealth team at the frontline of COVID-19 developed a handbook of clinical pearls, which are small bits of relevant care information based on experience and observation, in the early days of the pandemic. This handbook was shared with hospitals across the country so that their staff could learn more about how best to care for patients with the virus.

"It was a true team effort in the face of uncertainty, and we did our best to care for our community at the forefront of a global pandemic that had just reached our shores," said Michael Chu, MD, an EvergreenHealth hospitalist who also oversaw the COVID-19 ward in the first weeks of the pandemic. "After those first few weeks, we shared a handbook of clinical pearls so that other hospitals throughout the country could learn from our unique experience. I hope that our community can be proud of EvergreenHealth's response to such unprecedented times and continue to trust us with their healthcare no matter what comes our way in the future."

Efficient Testing & Screening

EvergreenHealth established in-house testing and the nation's first drive-through testing site for our staff and those most at risk for exposure, including first responders.

Reverse Airflow Engineering

Long before the rise of COVID-19, EvergreenHealth took steps to ensure our structural engineering could adapt to the threat of a respiratory illness like COVID-19. At the onset of the pandemic, we converted one-third of all hospital beds, including half of the Emergency Department and all patient units in our Silver Tower, into negative airflow rooms to prevent the spread of the virus.

"Our engineers here converted the 1976 critical care unit into negative flow by rearranging the outflow ventilation on the roof of that second-floor structure. Environmental Services stepped in and endlessly provided cleanings and services to allow us to move patients where they needed to go," recalled Dr. Riedo. "So, it was not just the medical team, it was the Environmental Services team, the engineers and food service workers who make the organization and infrastructure work for our community."

Continued Care

To ensure patients continued to receive preventive and critical care unrelated to COVID-19, EvergreenHealth responded by developing a telehealth option within a two-week period, expediting our plans to deploy software, hardware, training and changes to workflows, billing and documentation, in order to ensure our patients continued to receive the care they needed. Telehealth technology was also utilized to allow families to virtually visit their critically ill loved ones when in-person visitation wasn't possible due to the risk of spreading the virus.

In many ways, EvergreenHealth's collective efforts helped our community return to a way of life similar to the one we all enjoyed before the pandemic. At the same time, we're also embracing many of the best practices we developed and adopted over the last 5 years to keep each other safe and remain prepared for when our community needs us again during a public health crisis.

Invaluable Support From Our Community

The support EvergreenHealth providers, nurses and staff received from our community was invaluable. Businesses, residents and community groups donated meals, gifts and discounts to our essential staff working round the clock to care for our patients.

More than 25,000 meals were donated to keep our staff nourished, and heartfelt cards and signs expressing the community's support helped inspire and motivate our frontline providers and nurses.

"One of our patients who thankfully was able to get through this illness did us a kindness," said Melissa Lee, MD, director of the EvergreenHealth Intensive Care Unit. "He built a sign that we had posted out on our lawn for years. It said 'CCU and PCU,' referring to our intensive care unit and our step down, 'rocks.' That is just one example of so many ways our community here at EvergreenHealth supported us. We're a team. We do this together. We understand that you trust that we're going to be ready, that we're going to have everything we need to keep you healthy, to keep you strong and to get you through the illness, any illness that comes our way. We're ready. We've done this before. We know how to do it again."

Take a look at the following photos we captured of our staff and some examples of the wonderful community support EvergreenHealth received during the pandemic: