Insights: Disaster planning crucial for medical practices in path of destruction

In this episode of the MGMA Insights podcast, we’re joined by Bob Bush, Vice President of Business Development & Physician Services at the University of Kansas Health System St. Francis Campus. Just over a year removed from helping Panama City’s Bay Medical Sacred Heart through the devastation of Hurricane Michael, Bush is well-versed in disaster management. He sat down with Insights host Daniel Williams during MGMA’s 2019 Annual Conference in New Orleans to share his insights on preparing and executing a disaster plan. 

Don’t quite have time to listen to the entire episode? No worries. We’ve compiled a handful of highlights from Bush’s interview for your convenience:

• (3:38) “A disaster could be a snowstorm. It could be a rain. It could be a tornado. It could be a hurricane. Could be earthquakes. But it also could be something more like all of a sudden you lose connectivity to your hard drive, so you lose all your patient charts or you have a fire or there’s a flood … so, disasters, it could be a lot of different things for a lot of different situations. But the thing that you have to continue to look at is what can you do to be preparing for those things and how do you minimize the impact on your practice when those disasters happen?”
• (17:43) “We did role playing. We did tabletops. We did everything you can do short of an actual disaster of that magnitude. But all that role playing and the training really helped us think through what our options were. … It’s one of those things where I think all the training helped give us a good, strong baseline to help us make those correct decisions once it really happened.”
• (18:46) “We really had an awesome team of people that were there. … We all brought something to the table from previous experiences, and I think we all just worked together and continued to look at what can we do to get the patients taken care of and then also take care of the community once we had our patients taken care of.”
• (19:50) “We couldn’t get tied up with the emotional distraught of what was going around us. We had a job to do. We had to take care of our patients. We had to get them out of the facility safely. We had to take care of the other people in our facility. And that was our focus.”

Here are some links and references related to this week’s show: 

• After Michael, damaged hospital preps for patients (VIDEO)
• How robust is your practice’s emergency planning and disaster preparedness?
• Bay Medical Sacred Heart Hurricane Michael (VIDEO)
• As Florence bears down on East Coast, a reminder to medical groups to be prepared for disaster
• When disaster strikes, does your practice have a plan in place?

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We love hearing from listeners about the show. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or experts you’d like us to interview, email us at podcasts@mgma.com or reach out to MGMA Sr. Editor and podcast host Daniel Williams on Twitter at @MGMADaniel. 

MGMA Insights is presented by Craig Wiberg, Rob Ketcham, Decklan McGee and Daniel Williams. 

To further guide your healthcare career, be sure to check out MGMA’s October Book of the Month, “Navigating to Value-Based Outcomes,” by Thom Walsh. To purchase or preview the book, visit mgma.com/navigating.