UCSDH COVID-19 Incident Response

University of California, San Diego Health (UCSDH) is a large regional academic health system encompassing 2 acute care hospitals, outpatient primary and specialty medical and surgical care, and emergency patient care. UCSDH is also 1 of 5 academic medical centers within a broader 10-campus University of California system. UCSDH utilizes a commercially available, electronic health record (EHR), Epic (Verona, WI), and hosts over 300 affiliate physicians across 10 medical groups on this EHR. San Diego County served as a quarantine site for both Chinese expatriates and cruise ship passengers, and also experienced community spread of COVID earlier than much of the US.¹⁹ An Incident Command Center (ICC) was established at UCSDH on February 5, 2020 for 24-hour monitoring and adaptation to rapidly evolving conditions and recommendations on a local, state, federal, and global scale. An assessment of the institutional current state revealed the need to develop a rapid screening process, hospital-based and ambulatory testing, new orders with clinical decision support, reporting/analytics tools, and the enhancement/expansion of current patient-facing technology.