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Leading the Country in Response to COVID-19

On February 28, 2020, EvergreenHealth's Kirkland campus became the first hospital in the U.S. to respond to the first known cases of community spread of COVID-19, marking the beginning of the global pandemic in the U.S. Given that we had been actively engaged in disaster readiness planning for many years prior to the pandemic, our hospital system was ready to face the challenge.

In the days following the identification of the first positive COVID-19 cases, EvergreenHealth quickly ramped up numerous new protocols and systems, many of which were developed in partnership with and adopted by the CDC. As new information came to light, our providers and staff continued to lead the way in evolving and updating best practice approaches, which were then adopted in other health care settings across the country.

Many of those best practices stemmed from decisions made in EvergreenHealth's Incident Command Center, based on the National Incident Command System model, which our leaders had developed as part of ongoing training. For more than a decade prior to the pandemic, EvergreenHealth invested in sending teams of 20 every year to the Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston, Alabama, where they participated in intensive crisis response training that informed many of the critical steps the health system took in addressing COVID-19.

EvergreenHealth's experience as one of the first hospitals to navigate the pandemic was featured extensively by media, including coverage in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, CNN, NPR and dozens of other publications and outlets.

The stories chronicle the health system's initial steps that laid a strong foundation for a comprehensive response to the pandemic for the months and years to come. Its early response included:

An NIH Clinical Trial Site: EvergreenHealth became the first site in the U.S. to enroll qualifying patients in the National Institute of Health's Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT). As one of the many COVID-19 trials that contributed to a global body of work, these trials studied the safety and efficacy of novel therapeutic agents and were later approved for use in hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Efficient Testing & Screening: The hospital system established in-house testing and the nation's first drive-through testing site for our staff and those most at-risk for exposure, including first responders.

Reverse Airflow Engineering: Long before the rise of COVID-19, EvergreenHealth took steps to ensure our structural engineering could adapt to the threat of a respiratory illness like COVID-19. At the onset of the pandemic, we converted one-third of all hospital beds, including half of the Emergency Department and all patient units in its Silver Tower, into negative air flow rooms to prevent the spread of the virus.

Continued Care: To ensure patients continued to receive preventive and critical care unrelated to COVID-19, EvergreenHealth responded by developing a telehealth option within a two-week period, expediting our plans to deploy software, hardware, training and changes to workflows, billing and documentation, in order to ensure our patients continued to receive the care they needed.

Following the early days and months of the pandemic, EvergreenHealth continued to be a leader in our response to COVID-19, and we continue to recognize the countless contributions, sacrifices and resiliency of every member of our community.

With COVID-related state and federal emergency orders at an end, we're starting a new chapter in our journey together as we shift from an emergency response to more routine management of the virus. In many ways, EvergreenHealth's collective efforts have helped our community return to a way of life similar to the one we all enjoyed before the pandemic. At the same time, we're also embracing many of the best practices we developed and adopted over the last three years to keep each other safe.

Read more about EvergreenHealth's response to the COVID-19 pandemic: