COVID-19 Level-Loading: Transferring Emergency Department Patients to a Partner Academic Medical Center Within a Healthcare System

Lee, Andy H.; Dunn, Peter F.; Cooper, Stephanie; Seger, Robert; Raja, Ali S.; Safavi, Kyan C.; Yun, Brian J.

COVID-19 continues to challenge bed capacity and the ability of hospitals to provide quality care for patients around the country. However, the COVID-19 pandemic at a given point in time does not impact all hospitals equally—even within a single healthcare system, one hospital may be caring for patients in the hallways, while another has available inpatient beds. Here, we demonstrate a program to level-load COVID-19 patients between 2 academic medical centers in a healthcare system by transferring patients at the time of admission from the emergency department of one institution directly to an inpatient bed of the other institution. Over 42 days, 50 patients were transferred which saved 432 bed-days at the home academic medical center without any adverse events during transfer or upgrades to the ICU within the first 24 hours of admission. Programs like this can expand a healthcare system’s ability to allocate personnel and resources efficiently for patients and maximize the quality of care delivered even during a pandemic.