Summer 2020 Edition

As the novel coronavirus began to spread across Houston, it became clear that Memorial Hermann Life Flight® would eventually be called upon to transport COVID-19 patients. One of the nation’s pioneers in air-ambulance transport, Life Flight would need to devise a plan on how to safeguard both patients and crewmembers aboard the aircraft. Tom Flanagan, a long-time Life Flight crewmember and now the executive director of the program, helped assemble a team of key leaders to create a plan that would involve a new robot crewmember.

Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center has been designated as a Level IV Trauma Center by the Texas Department of State Health Services after consistently demonstrating its ability to provide advanced trauma life support, evaluation, stabilization and diagnostic services. "This designation is important to the Memorial City and surrounding community because it confirms our team’s ability to manage trauma cases as they arrive in to our hospital,” said Paul O’Sullivan, Sr. Vice President and CEO of Memorial Hermann Memorial City and Memorial Hermann Greater Heights Hospital.

A new helipad-to-OR process, launched at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in August 2018, enables Memorial Hermann Life Flight nurses and paramedics to transport qualifying patients directly from the helipad to the OR, bypassing the ER. Data compiled by Memorial Hermann shows that, to date, the process has reduced patients’ time to definitive therapy by an average 30 minutes. “Our first patient was a gunshot wound in the abdomen, from Baytown. The time from his gunshot to his arrival in the Memorial Hermann-TMC OR was only 57 minutes,” says Life Flight paramedic Josh Cools.

A new initiative at Memorial Hermann Pearland Hospital is helping EMS personnel get in and out of the hospital’s Emergency Center faster. Through the hospital’s EMS Save Time initiative, launched October 2019, EMS units call ahead to provide report on each patient. Upon arrival, the patient’s bed or room assignment is posted on the tracking board, allowing EMS personnel to take the patient straight to their assigned bed or room. A similar initiative has been designed at Memorial Hermann Southeast Hospital, where EMS units call ahead to expedite the admission process upon arrival.