Together Counts More Than Ever: COTS Membership Soars During Pandemic
COTS has been coordinating trauma, emergency services, and emergency preparedness since the late 1990s when they began operating a trauma registry and using that data to drive best practice. Due to their ability to offer a neutral ground for care coordination and collaboration, they’ve successfully begun centralized coordination of trauma education for our doctors, advanced practice providers and nurses, developed best practice emergency services guidelines, and took on coordination of emergency preparedness for 36 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
For central and southeast/southeast central Ohio healthcare partners, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved that together counts more than ever.
Because of the unique and valued partnership built during the pandemic, COTS’ membership has grown by 13 hospitals and free-standing emergency departments and 14 public/private first responders. You can view a list of all members here.
Take a minute to learn about the value COTS has brought to Hocking Valley Community Hospital President & CEO Ms. Stacey Gabriel:
Stacey Gabriel | Hocking Valley Community Hospital President & CEO
“During our 2021 DNV accreditation survey, a session was devoted towards COVID and how we had prepared as a rural hospital. During this time we shared the concept of "load-balancing" with our surveyors. Being a rural hospital, they understand that our resources can be somewhat limited and asked how we worked to handle the more critical patients. They were impressed to hear about the collaboration that took place by dividing the state into three different "zones" and how those zones coordinated on a daily basis (when needed) to accept and or transfer patients to other facilities that had the space. This was made possible by the work of the COTS and our ability to use the Coalition Disaster Incident Management System (COHDIMS) to enter our current hospital situational report. This was emailed out to the leads of each hospital daily and allowed us to pre-plan for the acceptance of patients from other facilities and/or who we should contact first (dependent on bed availability) if we needed to transfer a patient out. This saved a significant amount of time and unnecessary phone calls when having to make transfer arrangements. The Surge Operations Call Center (SOCC) was beneficial in only having to make one call in order to find a hospital bed in the Columbus area. We very much appreciated the coordination efforts.”
