In the op-ed, John Halamka, MD, president of Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic platform, Jayson Marwaha, MD, a general surgery resident in Washington, D.C., and Gabriel Brat, MD, a trauma surgeon at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center explained that states have been acquiring vital medical supplies on their own and the nation needs a coordinated national effort to prevent supplies from being underused.
“This free-for-all has prompted unnecessary stockpiling and uneven distribution of resources based on purchasing power instead of on patient need,” the authors wrote.
Drs. Halamka, Marwaha and Brat recommended three steps to begin effectively allocating COVID-19 medical supplies across the country:
1. Institute a framework for dispersing ventilators; the framework must specify which hospitals get priority, how the machines will be delivered and when organizations who lend ventilators will get theirs back if they share them across healthcare networks.
2. Develop a trusted independent body to monitor and manage allocation of ventilators and other scarce resources in the U.S.
3. Rely on data to drive allocation decisions, such as predictions for which states and health systems will need ventilators as well as hospital-level data to track ventilator use.
“To maximize the lifesaving potential of our country’s ventilators, we need a plan to get them to where they are needed most,” the authors concluded. “Complete visibility over the country’s existing resources — empowered by a robust national data reporting system — will help us do this, and we need to build it as soon as possible.”
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