Managing the COVID-19 pandemic: Five lessons learned from a Georgia healthcare system

On 9 March 2020, Piedmont Healthcare diagnosed its first case of COVID-19. Piedmont is committed to the operating company model with a focus on the value of ’systemness’ at our facilities. We dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic using a system approach but allowed for local management to modify as context required. This paper is an attempt to capture the learnings of our system by balancing these system and local dynamics. In view of the urgency of the pandemic, system and local incident command centres were set up in less than 12 hours. Piedmont used a combination of quality and process improvement methodology, as well as the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS) structure. Piedmont Henry Hospital — a 236-bed community hospital in Stockbridge, Georgia — set up its local incident command centre on 16 March that focused entirely on that single facility. Soon after the first case of COVID-19 arrived, a wave of many others soon followed, filling up the intensive care units (ICUs). The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for our healthcare system and our employees, but it has given us an opportunity to grow as an organisation. Most notably, we experienced the benefits of a true operating company model, with a centralised corporate structure supporting the hospitals and clinics within the system. In what follows we share five lessons we have learned at Piedmont Healthcare from this global pandemic.