Advocating for more, operating with less: RWJBarnabas's Ostrowsky on COVID-19.

Byline: Anthony Vecchione

For RWJBarnabas Health Chief Executive Officer Barry Ostrowsky and his colleagues in the health care business, the COVID-19 pandemic is unique and unlike anything they have faced in the past.

"Our system right now, which has not seen the worst of it as of Wednesday morning, has approximately 400 inpatients across 11 facilities that are either under investigation and or converted to the virus," he told NJBIZ. "We expect that is going to go up significantly."

Ostrowsky said that there will be more testing capacity in the macrosystem to determine how many more people have the virus, and what percentage of them are going to be significantly sick enough to be hospitalized.

"We have organized ourselves trying to consider what that wave is going to look like. What our contingency plans are with respect to space and staffing and of course the infamous PPE [personal protective equipment]," said Ostrowsky.

He said his teams meet multiple times a day to ensure that they are using the right guidelines and making the right operational decisions that have to be made.

"At the end of the day, it is very much only at a hyper level. Very much what we see all the time is you have to support the front line staff who interface with the patients and who are truly heroic in what they are doing. You have to give them sufficient resources and you have to ensure that everything that is needed by the patient and their families is mobilized."

He pointed out that it's a little more difficult under these circumstances because they don't have everything at their immediate command and control that they would like. As a result, they end up advocating for more and operating with less.

Leveraging what you have

Among his concerns, some of Ostrowsky worries are based on the modeling that he sawbecause this pandemic has not hit its peak yet.

"Part of what you do is plan for that, and as you plan for it you use up a lot of emotional energy and so you have folks that already have expended a tremendous amount of their reservoir personally and we haven't yet hit the worst of it."

He added, "[E]veryone is facing it and health care workers are the best in my view and we will get through it, but it is a consideration as to how much you expend even before you meet the worst of the impact."

He said the mask situation...