How An Indiana Hospital Got It Right When MERS Showed Up At The Door
There are now two confirmed cases of deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in the United States, and neither was discovered at a big teaching hospital like Massachusetts General in Boston or Mount Sinai in New York. Which only emphasizes the need for all health-care personnel to be ready to respond to new crises the way medical authorities at Community Hospital in Munster, Ind., did when this country’s first MERS case showed up at its emergency room April 28.
Community Hospital is not some tiny facility in the middle of nowhere. It’s in a bedroom community 30 miles from downtown Chicago, has 430 beds and sees 70,000 people in its emergency department annually. Still, MERS might not have been the first thing on the minds of doctors and nurses when a still-unnamed patient came into the emergency department with symptoms of what looked like a bad case of the flu.
And that’s the point, Alan Kumar, the hospital’s chief information officer, told me Monday: Staff are drilled on proper procedures for handling infectious diseases regardless of what they might be, so if they ever face a situation like this one, the danger can be contained.
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Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, praised Community Hospital for its infection control and the rapid isolation of about 50 health-care workers who were exposed to the MERS patient so they did not create a chain of transmission.
In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of Community’s handling of the case is how it figured out who had been near the patient. Officials there reviewed security tapes, tracked the sign-ins required of everyone — from doctors to housekeepers — who entered the patient’s room and tracked them via the RFID badges they wear, which show their locations at all times. About 50 were sent home and kept isolated there until the hospital could be sure they did not have MERS. They are returning to work Monday and Tuesday, Kumar said.
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