COVER STORY
Orlando Health Helps Community Become ‘Business Ready’ BY DIANE SEARS
A
t this time last year, medical professionals around the world were watching news reports from China about a coronavirus that looked serious. It was on the distant radar at Orlando Health and its facilities all over Central Florida. Then the first local cases showed up.
“At first I was concerned, but I don’t think anybody sensed the scope we were going to be facing. I had no idea,” said Dr. Donald Plumley, a pediatric surgeon with Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children for 26 years. Plumley also serves as the hospital’s trauma medical director and its chief quality officer.
“Once it started, I was like everyone else who said, ‘This is going to be a few months.’ … By mid-March, we were on board and knew this was serious and we were going to have to make some tough decisions. Do we keep working, do we stop working? Difficult decisions that had far-reaching consequences, not only for our own practices but for our patients and their livelihood.”
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What happened next was a testament to the hospital system’s deep ties to the community. CEO David Strong and the senior leadership team appointed committees to specialize in different aspects of handling the pandemic. They focused internally on protecting and mobilizing the hospital’s team so everyone could work safely. And then they looked externally. Plumley was tapped to co-lead a committee that would help local businesses bring their employees back to work safely. His partner on the project was Thibaut van Marcke, president of Orlando Health Dr. P. Phillips Hospital in the Sand Lake area and senior vice president of the hospital system’s southeast region. The team developed Business Ready, a program that has since been adapted into a similar plan for schools. The initiative represented good foresight by the hospital’s senior leadership team, Plumley said. “We had been in the pandemic about six weeks when this came about. We realized we had gotten through the worst of our first wave and had not only treated hundreds of patients but had kept 20,000 team
We realized we couldn’t be in a holding pattern for months on end. We had learned there was a safe way to take care of our patients and of our business, and we felt strongly we could take our learnings and share them with small, midsize and large businesses. – Thibaut van Marcke
