OAHHS Hospital Voice Spring/Summer 2021

14 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. let’s band together and do this because we need to vaccinate everyone in the community as rapidly as possible. We all knew if we did it independently it would take too long.” Puzzle Pieces Just a few weeks after deciding that a mass vaccination site was the best bet, the OCC site started to come together. And it was then that each health system’s unique contribution came to the forefront. For Kaiser, it was securing the con- vention center site. Due to the shutdown of large conferences and events, the convention center was available for use. It also made sense for its location near mass transit, its parking garage and other ameni- ties. Legacy’s Epic electronic health record platformmade the most sense for the vaccination site, and Providence already had a large call center that could be expanded to handle the 2,000-plus calls that would be coming in every day. OHSU had a drive-through COVID testing operation in place at Portland International Airport; converting that to a second vacci- nation site made for a nice compan- ion to the OCC location. “Each hospital brought a unique strength,” Watson said, “So every- thing worked together and worked well.” All four health systems contrib- uted staff to the site, including clinical staff, managers, and exec- utives. The site was also depen- dent on hundreds of volunteers and teams from the Federal Emer- gency Management Agency and the National Guard. “Having one large site made it eas- ier to attract resources and scale and leverage the size of the facil- ity,” said Joe Ness, COO for OHSU. “It was much easier to have FEMA and the National Guard at one site versus splitting them up to all the different campuses.” Hitting the Peak When the OCC site first opened, the operation was set up in a large ballroom and capacity was about 3,000 shots per day. Watson said there were initially some issues with long lines and backups; there was also the realization that 3,000 shots a day wasn’t enough. That led to securing the larger exhibit hall space in the conven- tion center. OHSU and Legacy also assigned process improve- ment experts to the site who were able to make the operation run much more efficiently. “That made it so there were just no delays,” Watson said. “That was a key contributor to getting us to a point where we were able to do 8,000 shots a day. It worked very smoothly.” Though the OCC site hit its 8,000- shot peak for multiple weeks, demand started to drop off fairly steeply by early May. Ness said there would be spikes as each new population was given the green light to get vaccinated, but then numbers would drop again. Orga- nizers tried to entice more people to come in with walk-in options and a self-scheduling tool on the website; they also partnered with schools and community-based organizations and offered them blocks of appointments. While those efforts helped, demand still plummeted. The hospitals, too, needed their staff back in the hospital. So, in early May, the team announced that the OCC site would be offering the first dose of the vaccine through May 27. In June, it started offering only the second