Mechanical ventilation—the most common treatment for these patients thus far—involves inserting a breathing tube into the windpipe so a ventilator can pump air into the lungs. Using a ventilator or intubation as a last resort—an approach UChicago Medicine teams call “prevent the vent”—helps get COVID-19 patients out of the hospital intensive care unit and prevents harmful side effects caused by ventilators, such as lung injuries.
“Avoiding intubation is key,” Spiegel said. “Most of our colleagues around the city are not doing this, but I sure wish other ERs would take a look at this technique closely.”
This approach is not without risk, however. The high-flow cannulas blow air out, which converts the COVID-19 virus into a fine spray in the air. To protect themselves from the virus, staff must have proper personal protective equipment, negative pressure patient rooms, and anterooms, which are rooms in front of the patient rooms where staff can change in and out of their safety gear to avoid contaminating others.
UChicago Medicine’s Emergency Department recently doubled its number of anterooms, thereby doubling its capacity to give high-flow nasal cannula to patients. The main hospital also added negative pressure rooms on two floors, making it safer and easier to take care of COVID-19 patients.
Since the first COVID-positive patient was admitted March 13, UChicago Medicine has successfully treated and discharged 297 patients with the virus. Even as the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has grown, doctors have managed ventilator usage. As of Wednesday, UChicago Medicine had 137 COVID-19 patients, but only 27 of them were on ventilators. The medical staff has avoided mechanical ventilation on 40% of patients, and extubated 50% of those who needed ventilators, O’Connor said.
“It’s a phenomenal number, because in Italy, the number of extubations was much lower,” O’Connor said, who also gave credit to the cross-team collaboration.
UChicago Medicine care teams got an early preview of how COVID-19 treatments were working in China and Italy from the university’s hospital affiliates in those countries. When the time came for the Hyde Park-based health system to start caring for COVID-19 patients, they’d already concluded that steroids were an ineffective treatment. The UChicago Medicine teams opted to use less invasive approaches, such as HFNCs or helmet ventilators. For patients who did require mechanical ventilation, the goal was to get those people off the ventilator as soon as possible.
O’Connor and Spiegel agree that the steps the city took to flatten the curve worked. At first, UChicago Medicine was doubling its cases every 2-3 days, leaving doctors terrified of running out of space, staff and equipment. Now that the doubling time of COVID-19 patients has slowed to approximately 12 days, it helps the hospital staff generate good outcomes.
“The curve having been flattened has provided us a world of relief,” Spiegel said.
Adapted from an article published by University of Chicago Medicine.