Hospital Council members receive Council Connect,
our electronic newsletter that shares everything we’re
working on for you.
In articles as diverse as our membership — from rural
to urban, and Sierra to sea — we spotlight the
individuals and institutions who are moving the ball forward,
while also sharing news on new ideas and innovative approaches
from our endorsed business partners.
On Sept. 1, Anthem Managed Medi-Cal held its
second-ever advisory council meeting for north state
rural providers. Anthem is making progress in many areas
important to providers, including telehealth, social determinants
of health, and COVID-19 response. The meeting included many
representatives from clinics and counties, and RVP T Abraham will
work with Anthem to get more hospitals involved, specifically
case managers and patient billing representatives.
As Californians endure the impacts of the
state’s wildfires, the National Association for Behavioral
Healthcare reminds all members of resources available through the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
If you missed the Aug. 27 Hospital Council
webinar — PSPS Update: What Hospitals Served by
PG&E Need to Know — or just want to review, it
is now available as an on-demand recording. The webinar
presentation and recording have been posted here,
where you will also find:
With the 2019-2020 legislative session behind us, it’s time to breathe a brief sigh of relief. We can — and should — take a moment to relish the accomplishments over the past months, and in the recently concluded legislative session:
After a comprehensive review of background screening companies,
Hospital Council and Hospital Association of Southern California
(HASC) have jointly named Accurate as an endorsed business
partner for employment screening services.
In a year that has already brought so many challenges, the last thing we needed were the lights to go out — without any warning. However, that’s what some of your hospitals encountered during the recent heat wave. Recognizing that this situation likely remains top of mind for many of you, especially as we approach the public safety power shutoff (PSPS) season, we wanted to update you on where things stand with PG&E.
SUNRx, a health care
technology company that assists health care facilities with 340B
administration and an endorsed business partner of the Hospital
Council, is presenting a webinar designed to share 340B insights
and help hospitals better support their uninsured patients. The
third installment in the SUNRx 340B webinar series — Innovation
in Contract Pharmacy — will be held at 11 a.m. (PT) on Sept. 8.
Throughout August, Rebecca Rozen has convened
East Bay Section hospitals for a weekly COVID-19
conference call to check in with each other and compare notes
across the region, share information, address mutual challenges,
and provide a forum to raise issues for resolution. The
calls have been an invaluable touchpoint throughout the current
pandemic.
CHA has released this
“Perspective” on Senate Bill (SB) 758, aimed at legislators
and reinforcing the idea that California needs to think
differently about disaster planning while extending the deadline
for seismic mandate compliance. CHA is pushing this message to
legislators via social media and other channels through Thursday
afternoon, but that may change depending on what happens with the
bill.
“Meet this moment.” It’s a phrase that for months Gov. Newsom has
been uttering during his press conferences and regular COVID-19
updates. And while he has at times taken flack on social media
for what may be considered by some to be overused, it’s safe to
say that it’s a fitting phrase for this time.
Just like Californians have “met this moment” by social
distancing, staying at home, wearing masks, etc., your hospitals
have more than “met this moment” and will continue to do so in
the months to come. And at the Hospital Council, it’s our job to
support you in any way that we can.
At Friday’s Hospital Council board meeting, we’ll share in
greater detail the work that has taken place over the past few
months to engage and inform member hospitals throughout our vast
service area to help you face the multitude of COVID-19
challenges head on.
You’ll hear about the work that Hospital Council, alongside CHA,
has done to support your hospitals and the communities you serve,
including:
Testing
Patient transfers
Identification and mitigation of local and regional outbreaks
Supply chain issues
Personal protective equipment challenges
Local, regional, state, and federal regulatory issues
Internal and external messaging
And you’ll get a chance to learn more about how we proactively
engaged hospital members through one-on-one and small group
virtual meetings to provide information in real time to state and
federal leaders.
We know the challenges your hospitals have faced have been many
and, at times, unrelenting. At the same time, we know that
COVID-19 isn’t all that’s on your plates these days. As summer
gets into full swing, that means wildfire season is just around
the corner. Our work with PG&E on public safety power
shutoffs (PSPS) began in March and continues now on an almost
daily basis. To date this work has included:
Confirmation of hospitals within the PG&E electrical
service territory
Collection and classification of specific meter information
from hospitals to inform hospital need and mitigation strategies
for each facility
Assessment, by hospital, of PSPS risk level and the
appropriate mitigation strategy for each hospital facility
(including locations likely to treat COVID-19 patients outside a
main hospital)
Inclusion of the Hospital Council in the first 2020 virtual
PSPS full-scale exercises
Although neither Hospital Council nor PG&E can guarantee the
power won’t ever go out, we can do everything possible to prepare
our members for if and when that time comes.
While we can’t predict when or where a wildfire may start, and
COVID’s trajectory remains unclear, you can count on us to be
here for you and the patients you serve.
Quick update on endorsed business
partners
You’ve probably seen our regular features on endorsed business
partners. For those of you who aren’t aware, these are resources
that members have asked for and business partners who have gone
through a strict vetting process. Designed to make members’ lives
easier, they also benefit the Hospital Council policy agenda by
generating revenue that goes toward our local and regional
advocacy efforts. If you haven’t done so yet, I’d encourage you
to check them out and learn more. More on this week’s endorsed
business partners can be found at the end of this newsletter,
including information about webinars they’re offering and that
you can refer to appropriate staff — one on physician recruitment
and one on complying with new Conditions of Participation
requirements from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
In the last issue of Council Connect, we invited you
to take a survey and share your thoughts
on Hospital Council priorities for the remainder of
2020. We want to know:
What are you most worried about for the rest of this
year?
What are the best lessons learned from COVID-19 that you can
share with the hospital field?
What additional assistance or information do you need from
the Hospital Council and our One Team partners,
including the California Hospital Association?
Survey results will be discussed by the Hospital Council Board of
Directors and referred to as resources and budgets are considered
for the remainder of 2020 and into 2021. Please take a
few minutes to complete the survey and let your voice be
heard. We want to hear from you.
As the demands of COVID-19 extend into the summer and continue to
stretch front-line health care workers both mentally and
physically, hospitals are reminded that the Hospital Quality
Institute’s Care
for the Caregiver webinar is available as an on-demand
recording.
The webinar includes practical and necessary tools to assist
hospitals and their employees in creating a peer support model
for adverse events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally,
the webinar offers information on how to engage in empathic
conversation with both patients and families.
In an upcoming webinar from Merritt Hawkins, the
nation’s leading physician search and consulting firm,
executives will review the emerging methods that
hospitals, medical groups, and other health care facilities
use to retain and recruit medical staff during the pandemic, as
well as factors that should be considered as we emerge from the
crisis. The webinar will be held July 16 from 10 to 11 a.m.
(PT).
The program will also cover original data
from a physician survey conducted by Merritt Hawkins, in
collaboration with The Physicians Foundation, that tracks how
physicians are being affected by and responding to COVID-19, as
well as information from a new white paper that
includes an instructive look at physician recruiting and
retention during these unique times.
To participate in the webinar, register here. Merritt
Hawkins is an endorsed business partner
of the Hospital Council.
On July 2, Brian Jensen convened a meeting with the
Stanislaus County Emergency Operations Centerand hospital CEOs to discuss each facility’s ICU
capacity to manage the rise in COVID-19 cases. The meeting
revealed that the increase in ICU usage is attributed to
non-COVID-19 patients who postponed care during the first wave
and that hospitals continue to work on implementing staffing
strategies to maximum bed capacity. For more information, contact
Brian Jensen at bjensen@hospitalcouncil.org.
On July 1, T Abraham organized an introductory meeting of
PG&E and leadership from the California Association of
Healthcare Facilities (CAHF) to discuss the vulnerabilities of
skilled-nursing facilities (SNFs) throughout the state. CAHF
agreed to provide SNF addresses to PG&E, which will assess
each site’s risk level for public safety power shutoff outages —
similar to what has been done for hospitals. For more
information, contact T Abraham at tabraham@hospitalcouncil.org.
New regulations from the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that take effect
in May 2021 require hospitals to share
their admission, discharge,
and transfer notifications and to ensure their
primary care and post-acute providers — anywhere in the country —
are notified about emergency department visits,
inpatient admissions, and other hospital-based
events.
During an upcoming webinar — tentatively scheduled
for late August — Collective Medical will
present its solutions to help hospitals meet
the new CMS requirements. The solutions are easy and
economical to implement for both hospitals currently on the
Collective Medical platform as well as those that are
not — and they ensure downstream providers are not
overwhelmed with notifications.
An endorsed business partner of the Hospital Council,
Collective Medical offers a real-time analytics and
care collaboration platform that connects more than 135
California hospitals to each other, health plans, and outpatient
providers. This enables care
collaboration for high-risk individuals, including the
homeless and individuals who have contracted or are at risk for
contracting COVID-19. The platform also supports value-based care
arrangements such as accountable care organizations and the CMS
BPCI-A initiative.
