Supporting Tribal Public Health Capacity in Coronavirus Preparedness and Response - 2020 - The Cherokee Indian Hospital (CIHA) plans a multi-pronged approach designed to strengthen tribal preparedness and response capabilities in response to COVID-19. In order to close gaps of critical need for both the EBCI tribe and other regional healthcare partners, the CIHA has identified staffing, systems, equipment, and supply needs to help us respond more effectively to the current COVID-19 crisis, and to support our regional capability to manage ongoing needs as the pandemic continues to unfold.Emergency Operations and Coordination: CIHA has redeployed staff and hired additional staff to support testing and treatment services. This includes shifting staff from their jobs in areas such as the pharmacy and primary care to full-time roles in testing, surveillance, and control. We have a limited number of qualified staff, so also need to pay overtime, and must schedule staff to ensure we have adequate coverage while still allowing necessary time off.Laboratory Capacity: We plan to use an additional ID analyzer, cartridges and portable printer to assess patients admitted to CIHA and potentially other regional hospitals, to help us coordinate our regional triage and management of patients by diagnosis and acuity levels.Health Information Technology: We have identified several activities where we have critical needs to build and enhance our HIT capabilities to support current and future COVID-19 and other emergency response efforts. We are seeking funding to support upgrades to the current telephone infrastructure to support additional capacity and new call center capabilities, expansion of current telemetry capacity at CIHA, upgrading two-way radios for enhanced communications among emergency response leadership, and acquisition of additional cell phones for use by emergency response personnel.Countermeasures and Mitigation/Infection Control: There are three specific activities we believeare vital to our ability to contain the COVID-19 virus and ke ep it from spreading to additionaltribal community members and others across the region. We are seeking funding to create a cache ofpersonal protection equipment (PPE) for our hospital, clinic and field staff to use as needed,renovating a room at our skilled nursing facility (SNF) as a negative pressure room, paying staffto support a dedicated COVID-19 isolation wing for lower-acuity residents at the SNF.Surveillance and Epidemiology: To help us to fill crucial gaps in our current capacity to respondto COVID-19, we are seeking funding to support the creation of a fully functional mobile testingunit that we can deploy quickly to local hotspots, purchase of equipment and supplies to stand upfield testing units at our satellite clinics, contracting with a local hotel for rooms in which tohouse low-acuity COVID-19 patients so they remain isolated while infected.Other: In addition to the above, another acute need we have determined is for a telemedicine platform at CIHA that will allow us to coordinate care for patients with more complex needs with specialists located at DLP Harris Regional Hospital (Harris) so those providers do not need to travel to CIHA and we do not need to transport patients to Harris. We also have identified the specific specialty services most needed by our CIHA patients and the anticipated amount of telemedicine support we would need from specialists at Harris.
