While COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations have increased sharply in recent weeks, Elaine Whaley encourages our nurses to continue to practice the safety precautions that have proven successful throughout this pandemic – both at work and at home – to prevent community spread of COVID-19 and promote a safer patient care environment for everyone. Read more
Like many projects across the organization, the implementation of Epic Tapestry has been on hold as we navigate our response to COVID-19.
But recently, project leaders were given the green light to return to this important work and the team is making great strides in getting the project back up and running.
Once implemented the system will allow Texas Children’s Health Plan to better integrate data for an improved member and provider experience. Tapestry, a module within Epic health care management, will help make this possible by first providing better information and improved work processes for employees who treat our more than 400,000 customers.
“The team has been incredibly patient and flexible as our pandemic response has taken priority,” said Justin Loudon, assistant vice president at Texas Children’s Health Plan. “However, COVID has resulted in an increase in health plan membership and served as a painful reminder of just how much efficiency and effectiveness must remain a focus for us. We are excited that the project is back on track.”
Epic Tapestry is an overarching application that will replace a variety of applications currently used. Its goal is to integrate the business of Texas Children’s Health Plan, and will:
All essential groups will be trained well before the Go Live date: Training will take place in a combination of ways, including:
Information Services educator, Elydia Villanueva, will lead training efforts for Texas Children’s Hospital employees, while Angie Ross, Epic Project Team Trainer, will lead training for Health Plan employees. Together they will ensure that impacted employees across the system will be prepared on Go Live day.
While the COVID-19 global pandemic continues to take center stage around the world, the community and staff at Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus held a special tribute to salute our heroes on the frontlines of this crisis. It was their turn to shine and be recognized for their hard work and sacrifice.
“Once the sirens went off, it was just this heart-warming experience to see everybody coming together,” said Lia Hales from Harris County ESD No. 48 Fire-EMS-Rescue, who collaborated with Texas Children’s to bring this event to West Campus. “We are all one, and we are all helping our community.”
On June 17, a parade of police and emergency vehicles representing several agencies – Harris County No. 48 Fire-EMS-Rescue, Katy Police, Harris County Sheriffs Office, and Community Volunteer Fire – made their way to West Campus. With flashing lights and sirens blaring, first responders waved to a cheering crowd of health care workers to show their appreciation and support for everything they do.
Ashston Tiney, a patient care assistant in the Nursing Operations Float Pool at West Campus, and her colleagues watched the parade as it passed the front entrance of West Campus and circled around the hospital where first responders thanked more frontline staff gathered outside the Emergency Center.
“I think it is amazing for our first responders to come out and take their time to show us their support,” Tiney said. “We love our community so much and we’re here to take care of them and their families.”
While some West Campus staff stood outside to watch the parade, others watched the celebration from their windows, including patient families. Staff say they were grateful and humbled by this experience.
“Many of the people who came out to support us are also on the frontlines themselves,” said Mary Reddick, Child Life activity coordinator at West Campus, who helped organize this event. “To see people wanting to give back to us in a time where we typically give back to them is very humbling.”
Texas Children’s West Campus leaders are grateful to our community partners for helping to plan and organize this celebratory event to honor our frontline heroes especially during these challenging times.
“I appreciate all of the time and effort committed to making this tribute successful,” said Gbolahan Harris, assistant director of Clinical Support Services at West Campus. “It was remarkable to see all the planning involved culminate into an uplifting experience for our frontline staff who enjoyed this shining moment.”
A new nine-bay labor and delivery ward at Area 25 Health Center in Lilongwe, Malawi, is providing women a private place to give birth, and clinical workers more space to deliver the same amount of babies per year born at the Pavilion for Women.
“This is a huge step forward for our patients and our clinicians,” said Dr. Jeffrey Wilkinson, vice chair of Global Health and professor, OB-GYN and director of the Global Women’s Health Program. “It falls right in line with our goal of providing the highest quality of care to the women and children we treat through our Global Women’s Health program.”
Formed in 2012, the program is a collaboration between Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation – Malawi and the Ministry of Health of Malawi. This public-private partnership leads the way in the development of transformative programs that benefit thousands of women and babies as well as scores of learners in low resource settings.
Women and children are disproportionately affected by lack of access to health care services, particularly in resource limited settings. Malawian women have some of the worst odds with 675 deaths per 100,000 live births – among the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world. By contrast, the ratio for US women is 14 deaths per 100,000 live births.
To improve these odds, the Global Women’s Health program has invested a lot of time and effort into expanding the quality and quantity of services offered at Area 25 Health Center, significantly alleviating the burden of increasing demand for maternal and neonatal services at Kamuzu Central Hospital (Lilongwe’s referral hospital) and Bwaila Maternity Hospital, the largest maternity unit in the region with 17,500 plus deliveries per year.
With the help of generous donors, a maternal waiting home, a four-room operating theater and now a new labor and maternity ward have been built to help clinicians, midwives and non-medical staff better serve the women and children of Malawi.
Each room in the new labor and delivery ward is equipped with a swinging door that leads out to a nurses’ station. One of the nine rooms has a private bath and shower. The other eight rooms share four private baths and showers, each with a sliding door for easy access.
Prior to opening the new ward, women at Area 25 were delivering their babies in a six-bed labor and delivery ward on beds lined up in one room and separated by only a curtain. Because of the cramped quarters, family members were not able to accompany or help their loves ones during delivery.
The new ward has enough space for one family member to be in the room during delivery, an accommodation that is somewhat unique in health care facilities across Malawi and sub-Saharan Africa. The old labor and maternity ward will be used for anti-labor, triage, admissions and evaluation of patients coming in for labor.
“This has been a transformational gift for the women and babies in this region,” said Dr. Ibe Iwuh, one of the OB-GYNs at Area 25. “It’s helped us not only provide high quality care to women but also to demonstrate the potential between a public-private partnership between a US academic institution, a US health care organization, and the Malawi Ministry of health.”
Dr. Chikondi Chiweza, one of the OB-GYNs at Area 25, said it’s very satisfying to see Area 25 become one of the busiest maternity wards in the area.
“Because of the waiting home, women who might have gone into labor far from a medical institution now have a safe place to wait during their last few weeks and days of pregnancy,” Chiweza said. “The operating theater has enabled us to take care of more complex patients, and the new maternity and labor ward will allow us to better meet the ever-growing demand of births and well-woman services.”
For more information about the Global Women’s Health program and Area 25, click here.
Interim Physician-in-Chief Dr. James Versalovic and several other Texas Children’s physicians recently published a paper in the Oxford Academic: The Journal of the Pediatric Diseases Society detailing the clinical course of 57 children with COVID-19 cared for at Texas Children’s at the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Catherine Foster with Infection Control and Prevention is the lead author of the paper and Dr. Judith Campbell with Infection Control and Prevention is the senior author.
The paper’s overall findings were that most of the children were mildly symptomatic, and only a few patients with underlying medical conditions required hospitalization. System wide, the patient evaluation processes at Texas Children’s allowed for prompt identification and management of patients with COVID-19.
“These outcomes are an affirmation that we were doing what we need to do to provide the best care for patients and their families,” said Campbell, medical director of Infection Control and Prevention. “They tell us that we are identifying patients early and getting them the help they need quickly all while helping to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”
Some key findings of the study, which took place during the first five weeks of the outbreak in Houston include:
Identification process
Patient demographics
Patient care
In addition to the data above, the paper evaluated Texas Children’s Hospital’s integrated system approach to the evaluation and management of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic by performing a retrospective assessment of all pediatric patients with COVID-19 cared for through the Texas Children’s system.
COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11. As of the beginning of June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 1.8 million COVID-19 cases and 100,000 plus deaths in the United States. Early reports have provided critical insights on the clinical manifestations of the disease in children. Most children appear to have asymptomatic or mild to moderate respiratory illness, whereas adults, especially the elderly, are more likely to suffer severe respiratory illness and a higher case fatality rate. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, data on the epidemiology and clinical course of pediatric patients with COVID-19 in the United States are lacking.
“That’s why it’s so important to document what we are seeing and doing and share these findings with the medical community worldwide,” Versalovic said. “Texas Children’s has been doing this since the onset of the pandemic and will continue to be on the leading edge of scholarship and care of pediatric COVID-19 patients.”
Paper authors include:
Dr. Catherine Foster, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Elizabeth Moulton, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Flor Munoz, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Kristina Hulten, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. James Versalovic, Interim Physician-in-Chief
Dr. James Dunn, Pathology
Dr. Paula Revell, Pathology
Dr. Tjin Koy, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Amy Arrington, Special Isolation Unit
Dr. Lucila Marquez, Infection Control and Prevention
Dr. Judith Campbell, Infection Control and Prevention
by President and CEO Mark Wallace
“U.S. children’s hospitals are national treasures. They offer, as they always have, the promise of a better future for kids. It’s our duty as a nation to provide the disaster relief and recovery support they need to help them through the COVID-19 crisis.”
I want to share an article from U.S. News & World Report about pediatric hospitals around the nation. It perfectly captures the heart of why children’s hospitals are so important for not only pediatric patients, but adult patients too.
Texas Children’s, and many other children’s hospitals, have played a vital role in keeping our communities safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are continuing to take bold actions in order to support and partner with our colleagues throughout the Texas Medical Center and our nation.
You know more than anyone about the compassion and expertise our teams exhibit every day, and how critical it is to ensure the future of our institutions.
I hope that after reading this, each of you take a moment to recognize that you make us a national treasure.
The storms
The following passage was written by Texas Children’s Chaplain Jessica Shannon.
There are many types of storms. Some are literal and some are figurative. It seems that both types of storms have been constant for months now. We wonder when the storms will stop, but they stir up everywhere we turn.
At times, it seems there is no end in sight. When will our organization feel the same again? When will our city feel the same? As soccer has been starting again around the world, we watch our favorite clubs play to empty stadiums that normally house well over 50,000 singing fans. Other sports will follow the same path or choose not to have a 2020 season at all. The storms seem to keep coming.
With storms comes fear, uncertainty, panic, and anxiety. Houston is no stranger to storms. Normally, we buy water, milk, and bread. The panic preparations for COVID-19 added toilet paper to everyone’s grocery list. Panic buying is coping with fear and uncertainty. It’s trying to control something when we feel helpless, and helplessness is a common feeling we witness in healthcare. Parents want to fix their child, and they can’t. They sit in their child’s room wanting to do something, anything, to help. They feel out of control. They are in a storm. We have all joined together in a storm, and we will get through it together.
We rely on each other’s gifts, jokes, wisdom, calming presence, words of love, and moments of peaceful silence to weather the storms of 2020. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on how the many patients and families we have cared for have coped with fear and helplessness. They found hope in us. They found hope in families in the playroom. They found hope in a kind employee. They found hope in their community.
Our community is full of environmental services representatives, doctors, advanced practice providers, social workers, chaplains, leadership, nurses, child life representatives, guest services, interpreters, and so many more gifted people who make Texas Children’s a family. May we all give each other hope and peace. May we all remind each other that, despite the uncertainty, the storms will end.