Strategies for Meeting Surge Capacity: Continuous Integrated Triage and Expanding the Healthcare Highway
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

SPEAKER:
Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez
Founder & President
High Alert LLC

WEBINAR OVERVIEW:
You stand with nine colleagues facing 5387 patients in need of triage. There are 540 more arriving every hour (9 per minute). How will you find those most in need of your care before it is too late? How will you keep from being overrun? Regular ER Triage won’t do the job. And once you triage them, where do you treat them?

Surge capacity means more than treating extra patients. There are family members, friends, bystanders and the curious to contend with. Before you can truly serve the surge, you must not only understand who makes up the surge, but what you will do with them once they arrive. To complicate matters, you must deal with laws such as EMTALA & HIPPA and agencies such as OSHA & EPA.

This is the situation that Dr. Ramirez, founder of High Alert LLC, and his team faced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Continuous Integrated Triage is the system used to triage 5387 people care in less than 10 hours at the Louis Armstrong International Airport following hurricane Katrina. He shares lessons learned from this riveting case study with workshop participants and they will take away a template for triage to implement at their facilities.

This webinar also explores how to maximize resources. Expanding the Healthcare Highway is the strategic resource allocation approach that creates capacity through the optimal deployment of existing resources. This webinar demonstrates the overall approach to increasing surge capacity up to 400% while providing detailed procedural guidance to make operations more efficient.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how the complex, diverse and multi-dimensional nature of surge impacts triage needs
• Discuss with your peers the moral, ethical and legal issues inherent to triage decisions
• Demonstrate methods to expand surge capacity up to 400%
• Adopt a casualty reception and triage process that matches staff and facilities to the complex, diverse & multi-dimensional surge, reducing wait times and treatment delays
• Amplify surge capacity with existing resources, ensuring continuity of care to the community
• Create resiliency throughout the healthcare workforce, increasing attendance, efficiency and morale

About the Speaker:

Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez is the founder and president of the consulting firm High Alert LLC. He serves on expert panels for pandemic preparedness and healthcare surge planning with Congressional and Cabinet Members. Board certified in multiple specialties, Dr. Ramirez is Founding Chairperson of the American Board of Disaster Medicine and serves the nation as a Senior Physician-Federal Medical Officer in the National Disaster Medical System.

Dr. Ramirez has a new book: You Can Survive Anything, Anywhere, Every Time. His website is www.High-Alert.com.

Recording:  $259