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As part of its Coronavirus Prep series, This Week in Health IT speaks to CIOs & CMIOs to discuss what they are doing and can be doing to prepare for COVID-19 in their communities. Special thanks to series sponsor and Galen partner, Sirius Healthcare.

In our own blog series, we will be providing our top takeaways from those conversations with the intent of spreading best practices among Health IT and healthcare delivery organizations to prepare for the anticipated surge in demand for care due to COVID-19.

Next up is David Chou, CIO, Luye Medical Group

Top Takeaways:

• Witnessed lockdown from peers in Shanghai 2 months ago, and now, we are going through that in the U.S. Lives are slowly going back to normal in Shanghai, providing optimism for our situation.
• Key is to identify, quarantine and isolate. Set up tents for testing, but also designate COVID-19 hospitals. Triage to take care of the sickest patients as soon as possible.
• After we are through this, and we ramp back up to go about normal life, more of the workforce devoted to IT and administration could be remote and free up space for care delivery.
• Some of the things we are implementing now, including telemedicine, VDI, RPM, have been on the top of mind for CIOs for quite some time, but have struggled to get budget or resources to dedicate that initiative. Unfortunately, it took crisis to move these initiatives forward at a rapid pace.
• Fundamental challenge is that if foundational infrastructure is not up to date, it will need to be addressed before scaling. In addition, must also retrain engineers who are traditional networking engineers, to instead be cloud engineers.
• Must understand how to take advantage of partners because hospitals and health systems are not development shops and its no longer advantageous to build in-house.

Full interview:

This Week in Health IT is also collecting resources and links designed to help health systems respond to and inform their communities around the Coronavirus. Visit their COVID-19 Resources for Health Systems page.