“Inpatient has been busy, still,” said Share Medical Center CEO Kandice Allen. “Covid is dying down. We’re happy about that. Staffing is good.” She was presenting her monthly report to the trustees of the Alva Hospital Authority Tuesday.

“Last week we met with a company to explore the option of doing some orthopedic surgery here. We’re excited about that opportunity, and we’re actually having a phone call tomorrow to discuss that further,” she said.

Allen explained that Dr. Gregg was not considered a full time replacement in general surgery for Dr. Ransom who retired. They are still exploring options for that position. “Regina (Wilson) and I met with a doctor last week, had a great conversation and are really excited about that possibility,” she said.

The hospital uses Meditech for their electronic health records. “We did meet with a hospital that has had Meditech, has had for many years. They have 26 IT staff members in place, and we are asking them for a proposal to help with our Meditech system to help with oversight and to help it get tuned up,” said Allen.

“It has been a challenge for our IT staff because with Covid they have not had any training opportunities available. This hospital would be able to provide us with seasoned Meditech specialists to help us."

Allen said it wasn’t included in her written report but “we met with (Alva) EMS. They have a new director, Bridgett Gragg. We met with her and Angelica (Brady) and did some planning. Down the road we’re looking to try to host some meetings for EMS for Alva and the surrounding communities to try to bring some educational opportunities, share in some of the continuing education that we at the hospital already take part in, trying to share our resources with them. We’re looking forward to that.”

In her written report, Allen noted that transferring patients out from Share Medical Center is becoming more difficult. It takes the entire team to make calls to find accepting hospitals with bed availability. “We are being told it is a staffing issue, not necessarily they are at capacity,” she stated.

Inpatient numbers at the hospital are holding steady with 31 admitted during September for a total of 93 acute hospital days and 27 for observation.

The emergency room had 296 patients admitted during September with 16 transferred to a higher level of care.

The hospital continues to provide discharge planning beginning with patient admissions and daily progress notes. The planning includes patient appointments made with their primary care provider upon discharge and specialists if needed.

In the IT status report, no threats from CrowdStrike were detected. Email is an entry point to the hospital network, and Share is using Zix encrypt which has a very good threat protection piece. It is blocking thousands of spam emails each month and is blocking known viruses from entering staff email. There were 831 known viruses blocked in email during September, up from 792 in August.

Allen attended the Oklahoma Hospital Association board retreat Oct. 12-13 in Oklahoma City.

She also noted that hospital “celebrated our awesome staff with a pizza party courtesy of Jason Gaisford (Alva Hospital Authority chairman).”

See more reports from the meeting in the Sunday Alva Review-Courier. A video of the meeting may be seen at http://www.AlvaReviewCourier.com.