In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City, killing dozens of people, destroying hundreds of homes, and causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage—all in the span of just 48 hours.

In southern Brooklyn—one of the areas hit hardest by the superstorm—a public hospital dedicated to treating the indigent was “pretty much underwater” and had no choice but to evacuate more than 220 patients, NYC Health & Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health COO Dianna Jacob told Healthcare Brew.

“We experienced three feet of water to one foot of water, depending where you were,” Dan Collins, facilities manager for South Brooklyn Health (SBH), the new moniker for the former Coney Island Hospital, added. “There was 144,000 square feet of first floor space that was completely flooded and had to be restored to get back in shape. That included our [emergency department], our main computers—all the elevators in the building were wiped out.”

In May—more than 10 years after Sandy crippled the Brooklyn hospital campus—SBH leaders officially welcomed patients to their new Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital tower: an 11-story, climate-resilient structure, built with $923 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds.

The new facility is one of 30 resiliency projects initiated across four affected H+H facilities in Sandy’s wake. New York City’s public hospital system secured $1.8 billion in FEMA grant funding for such efforts.

The tower, which marks the first new public hospital to open in the city since 1982, features a storm-resilient design to prevent the flooding and related issues that plagued critical patient services and infrastructure after Sandy. That includes a second-floor emergency department and elevated ambulance bay, deployable floodgates in elevator lobbies, and a fifth floor dedicated to critical infrastructure.

Keep reading here.—SY

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Shannon at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Shannon for her number on Signal.

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Amid rising rates of firearms-related injuries and healthcare worker assaults, more US hospital leaders are calling for action to address gun violence as a public health crisis.

Among them is Michael Slubowski, president and CEO of Michigan-based Trinity Health—one of the nation’s largest Catholic healthcare systems, with 88 hospitals across 26 states.

Slubowski has joined Northwell Health President and CEO Michael Dowling’s National Health Care CEO Council on Gun Violence Prevention and Safety, a task force of around 50 hospital executives formed in early 2023 to bring attention to the issue. Slubowski has also called on Congress to support bipartisan solutions to curb gun violence via enhanced background checks, expanded access to behavioral health services, and community-based violence prevention initiatives.

Trinity Health, meanwhile, has ramped up violence de-escalation training for its security personnel, developed a three-tiered workplace violence prevention program, and enhanced its security screenings—including installing metal detectors in emergency departments—as part of its commitment to safety.

Slubowski spoke with Healthcare Brew about these efforts and the importance of addressing gun violence through a public health lens.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the changes Trinity has made to promote gun violence prevention.

Gun violence is a public health and safety crisis: That’s our whole position. We’re not taking stances on gun rights or anything like that. It’s a fact that gun violence is a public health and safety crisis, and healthcare workers are on the front lines in our role to keep communities healthy and safe.

We’ve got advocacy efforts—working with [officials at the] local, state, and federal levels to address the root causes of gun violence.

Keep reading here.—SY

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights David Schneider, a medical informaticist and surgeon at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin. Schneider talked about how he got into informatics, what his job is like on a given day, and the work he does with UW Health’s digital health team.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What does it mean to be a medical informaticist?

A medical informaticist works to improve how we use information to improve health and healthcare. You can have medical informaticists who are of various specialties, like a nurse informaticist, dentist informaticist. I happen to be a surgeon and hold a board certification in clinical informatics. Improving healthcare also means improving the work of healthcare professionals—not just improving patients’ health, but making things easier for physicians, nurses, and all the various healthcare workers.

What kind of information exactly are you dealing with?

Patient information that’s stored in our electronic health record (EHR). A lot of the work we do is just making sure that information is showing up in the right places and that it’s flowing from other sources—whether through referrals or the lab system or radiology—then making sure it’s easy to find and easy to use by clinicians.

What does the day to day of your job look like?

I spend about half my time doing surgery and the other half of my time doing informatics. I also work with our digital health team here. A typical day involves a lot of meetings with the other informaticists, the information services analysts, other clinicians who are struggling with some aspect of the EHR.

Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: Federal Medical Center Devens, a prison in Massachusetts that treats inmates with complex medical conditions, was tied for last in the number of Covid-19 shots it administered during the first year of the pandemic. (Stat News)

Quote: “The main takeaway is that engaging in habitual physical activity in your leisure time seems to be connected with your pain tolerance—the more active you are, the higher your tolerance is likely to be.”—Anders Pedersen Årnes, lead author from the University Hospital of North Norway, on new research that regular exercise might improve pain tolerance (Fox News)

Read: More than half of patients who live in the “Diabetes Belt,” or 644 mostly Southern counties where the CDC determined there are high rates of the disease, are struggling with medical debt. (KFF Health News)

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