Will Bachman 00:01
Welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which connects you with the world’s top independent management consultants. And I’m your host Will Bachman. I’m so excited to be here today with our guest, Jason Byrne, who is the president and CEO of novant Health orthopedic Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s one of the hospitals as part of the novant Health integrated network. Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks. Well, it’s good to chat with you today. So Jason, would love to hear about the past month, six weeks what it’s been like running a hospital in the midst of the Coronavirus?

Jason Bernd 00:44
Absolutely. I can say well, that it’s been incredibly long journey, but one that I’m very proud of just to see how the frontline workers come every day to take care of patients to watch the collaboration that happens. Interestingly, what I’ll say is that the teamwork has been fantastic. The community support has been fantastic. So we’ve really seen a lot of the best of what people bring together. I think what I would characterize as the biggest thing with taking care of Coronavirus is that our assumptions and our understanding of the disease and how our progress in the community changed, sometimes every 3040 minutes. And so the need for the team to communicate the need for the team to be flexible, was paramount in order to make sure that we prepared and that we had everything ready to keep our team members safe to keep our community safe and help take care of these patients. So it’s been a really, I think, a successful journey for our organization, taking care of our community, and one that I think brought out a lot of the best and what we see people do

Will Bachman 01:55
give me a little narrative, let’s walk back to earlier in March, when this was when we when we all started realizing how this was getting you starting to get serious or maybe it was even earlier. In your case. What were How did you organize as a top team there at the hospital and part of the broader system in terms of, you know, making sure you had the right, you know, ventilators and other peepee and supplies? Maybe there was some work around just how you organize the shifts are how do you isolate Coronavirus patients is probably a whole multiple streams like how did you organize and set up different work streams to do the planning around this would love to hear that narrative of how you started and then we kind of walk through how it played out?

Jason Bernd 02:40
Absolutely. So the way we’re organized as a company, we have 14 hospitals across North and South Carolina. And we have you significant corporate support, whether that’s supply chain team, whether that’s infection prevention team. And so the way that we organized was there was really kind of a corporate structure that would try to make sure that we made consistent centralized decisions around disseminating information, particularly around infection prevention, around supplies, etc. And then that group really helped guide the best information, the best science to make sure that we were consistent in how we treat the visitors and how we, which which personal protective equipment that we wore, I think that that was handled really at a system level. And then from a communication perspective, we very quickly stood up daily phone calls, that were also kind of operational level in a local market perspective. So each facility had daily phone calls. And then we kind of had, for example, a Charlotte market call. And I think that that communication was really important to make sure because the information changed so rapidly, you could have a conversation at 9am. And by 11am, the governor had made an announcement and things that completely changed. And then by 1pm, you had a change from the federal level that you had to react to and implement. And then by 130, you had the CDC making a recommendation on masking that was different. So I think what worked really well was that we really quickly moved to centralized decision making and to having command center open a local level as well as a system level that can handle real time questions. And that could really prep communication that went out. I think something we learned as we went through was that there there needed to be communication about the plan, and then communication about when we’re going to execute the plan. And so I’d say that was another big learning is that because things change so rapidly in order to get people comfortable and in order to get team members comfortable. If we talked about a plan, we also had to commit to waiting to all implement at the same time so that there was not confusion or inconsistency in how in Visual facilities implemented infection prevention measures as an example. So again, just the structure and the communication, I think was really important part of the leadership to help make this help our preparations be successful.

Will Bachman 05:13
Talk to me a little bit about operations. So I think that you may have shut down certain types of electric elective procedures. And did you, you know, kind of, say all Coronavirus patients will go in this wing of the hospital or talk to me about some of the things where you had to quickly shift from normal operating procedures?

Jason Bernd 05:34
Well, I think that’s a really interesting question operationally about what we did differently. And I’ll say one of the things that we made a decision as an organization was we decided to cohort patients that had given until to basically one facility per city as an example, we had a our main campus in Winston Salem, we put we really cohorted the patients and we decided to transfer them from outlying facilities to the main tertiary hospital, we did the same thing in Charlotte. And I think in the long term, we saw significant benefit from that. One was because the expertise that was developed for those team members as they became much more comfortable taking care of patients that had given, we were able to really disseminate best practices from physician care from nursing care, as that team develop expertise. And the In addition, we were able to really do some things with the patient rooms. So we installed heppa filters that would actually extract the air or create a negative pressure environment and the patient rooms. And all that really is just a fancy way to say that we basically, you know, sucked all the air out, we exchanged the air out of the room constantly, just to make sure it was safer, that there wasn’t any airborne challenges. And what that gave us was an ability to have a safer environment if we had to give breathing treatments to patients or had to intubate patients and things like that. And so we did choose to cohort patients. And, and so I’d say that was a big operational decision we did that I think really did pay off in the long run, I’d say big picture. The other thing it did allow us to do was to, for example, I run a surgical hospital that’s connected to our main campus. And we chose to basically keep keep the patients with COVID, away from my facility. And that will allow us to open my facilities a little bit earlier, just because we’ve never had exposure to COVID patients in this building. We didn’t have them in the main campus. I think that the you know, the other thing that we really, really worked around was supply conservation. I think we saw some significant efforts around the organization about you know, do we use cloth masks? Do we have universal masking? Do you have cleaning of masks, and I think as an organization, we did a pretty great job, evaluating best science and really putting ourselves in a situation where we felt like we had ample supplies, to help keep our timber safe and our patients safe. And I was really proud of the way we coordinated that and work with that across the health system. So those are just a couple of examples of how we organized.

Will Bachman 08:16
Yeah, talk to me a little bit about the mess. I mean, that’s been so much in the news. And what are some of the things that you did you mentioned cleaning of mass, is that possible to somehow, you know, take a mass that’s been used and you know, I don’t know irradiated or, or, you know, do something to it to kind of, so it’s safe to use again.

Jason Bernd 08:36
So I think the here’s the interesting thing, one of the other things that we found about communicating during a crisis like this is that sometimes we actually decided to implement things that were actually not necessarily the best practice from a science perspective. But they were really important for team members to feel safe and secure. So as a, as an example, we as an organization went to Universal masking for all team members pretty early into this. And the science would say that you really only need to mask patients who are sick. And that you you really don’t need everybody to wear masks. However, people were really uncomfortable. There’s a lot of unknowns. There’s a lot of team members that were there, were asking if they could mask. And so we decided as an organization to say, you know what, let’s let’s have everybody go and wear surgical masks when they when they’re within six feet of a patient. And that way, it gave people a sense of security. It gave us a sense of consistency. So there was there was no confusion for our clinical team members about Can I wear a mask and to not wear a mask and sometimes we found that with communicating you know, we have 25,000 employees communicating with that many individuals. Sometimes we had to make decisions that helps promote a feeling of safety even if it wasn’t necessary. That’s completely necessary from a science perspective. So we did go up For some masking, we use the easier to find surgical masks for that. And then we had very clear definitions of When did you need to use the, the, I guess, the higher level mask like and 95 masks, and for us that was identified as really with the CDC with aerelon aerosolized procedures, where you are working with the patient, and you can, you could potentially have the COVID disease aerosolized out into the, into the environment. So, so I think, with universal masking, you made some consistency for our team. And then what we have been doing, we had two processes to basically clean and reprocess masks. So, one we started with is we do have these UV light disinfectants, and there are several whole systems, there’s one out of Nebraska that had basically use their UV light cleaners, which we will routinely use to clean up after patients that have C diff infections, or we might use them to clean up ours, just to keep ours particularly clean. And we you can use UV lights to disinfect masks and reuse them. And so we had that process going for a while. And then what we are doing now is there have been several other organizations that have looked at using hydrogen peroxide as a cleaner that really does help disinfect the masks organization, because the infection rates have not been as high as in some of the harder head areas. We’ve actually been cleaning these masks, but we have not put them back into circulation yet, because we have not had a shortage. So we have been able to continue to use new masks for all of our clinical team members. But as a abundance of caution to make sure that we’re prepared for any potential surge. We have started reprocessing and 95. Mass was have been very hard to find.

Will Bachman 11:54
You mentioned sort of these regular calls in the in the local market there in Charlotte, with those with including with sort of hospitals that were outside of your, of your company’s network so that you are coordinating as a whole city and what were what were those calls like what was the agenda? What was discovered? What would we have heard if we listened in on one of those calls?

Jason Bernd 12:17
Yeah, absolutely. So most municipalities have some form of emergency operations. And so Charlotte, Charlotte Mecklenburg County have an emergency operation center. And that group, you know, we’ve seen up that group when there’s severe weather, we sent up that our group when there’s the RNC or the DNC, so the Mecklenburg County Emergency Operations Center opened up fairly early, you know, in the middle of March. And what they have is police fire emfs hospitals, they have NGOs, and not for profits in the area, health and human services. And that group really helped operationalize the county’s response and the local government’s response in coordination with state and, you know, folks from the governor’s office, so that group did have they had a command center that was open. I can’t remember if it was open 24 hours, but it certainly has been open during daytime hours, seven days a week. And so we, the hospital used to have a representative there, again, some of the other organizations around town. And that group really helped with the county wide decision making. That group was responsible for Mecklenburg County and Charlotte actually initiated a stay at home order before the statewide order was issued by the governor. So that was the group that looked at the facility, hospital censuses, hospital capacity, looked at the community infection rates, and they made some of the calls around some of the public health services. So significant coordination, that group was also responsible for planning to see if we needed to build field hospital if we needed to have excess capacity besides regular hospitals. And that group does continue to evaluate At what point do we start to lift some of the stay at home? orders some of the the restrictions have been in place to try to keep the community spread low.

Will Bachman 14:10
Let’s talk about staffing a little bit. So was there a need or did you have to redeploy some some medical professionals to to work on the Coronavirus maybe outside their specialty?

Jason Bernd 14:24
Yes. So one of the interesting things that happened was that like most health systems, we stopped take, we stopped elective patient surgeries elective procedures. And what that just means is that we moved to a situation where we really only took care of time sensitive patient needs. And that was done to free up resources to make them available to handle any patient surges. And so patients that had medical emergencies and had urgent cases, patients that had disease processes that were in advancing, we’re still taking care of. But we we did see probably about somewhere between 50 and 60% of our patient care services really stop. And that allowed a significant amount of team members to be redeployed as needed to other services. What you found is imaging services like radiology and surgical services were areas that that were particularly hard hit with loss of of their regular scheduled work. But we use those team members to do things like we set up screening at all of our entrances for team members, for guests for patients. And so we we deployed clinical team members to do screening, we beefed up some of our nursing supervisor services and redeployed timbers there, we redeployed two members to our supply chain department to help with the purchasing supply chain routing. So we had a pretty significant pretty massive redeployment plan and scheme that not only addressed whatever day to day needs, there were but also planned in case there continued to be a surge of patients. An interesting thing, well, that happened. And I know a lot of businesses experienced this is the app. So so for health systems that so so our our patient volumes, were never, they never went beyond our capacity in Charlotte. So we always had more capacity, and then we had patients. So we actually ended up in an interesting situation where we had, we really had to work hard to try to find hours for our clinical team members. So if you could imagine that you’re a nurse, you’re you’re a caregiver, your primary breadwinner for your family, and you are preparing to potentially go to an area where you typically don’t serve to take care of COVID patients. But in the meantime, you might be not getting your regular scheduled hours. So as an organization, we had to really think about how do we, you know, care for our team members? How do we how do we make sure that there can take care of their families. And we actually, our organization created a $10 million emergency relief fund that our team members could access so that in case they had challenges, meeting their financial responsibilities, they’re about to do so and have some peace of mind, while they potentially had their regularly scheduled jobs disrupted. So there was an interesting balance that you could see across the, across the country where in some places, they certainly had facilities that were overwhelmed where people were working significant hours, where they’re redeploying to places where they’d not necessarily worked. In other areas, you have people waiting for a surge that never exceeded their their capacity. So you also struggle with really keeping these frontline health workers employed, keeping their their paychecks running, keeping their benefits and making sure that they’re okay, so that they can focus on taking care of, of the community when the community needs their help.

Will Bachman 18:01
Yeah, that’s a story that that, you know, I don’t think I’ve seen as much of is that, you know, a lot of people recognizing the healthcare workers as heroes, in some cases, if they’re not directly involved in Coronavirus care, maybe they’re actually you know, their income is suffering. How has it impacted the finances of hospitals? I’ve heard that, you know, I mean, some of the elective surgery might be some of the more profitable type of procedures to do. And if a lot of those have gone away, how is this impacting hospitals with with, you know, with the kind of decline and some of the procedures you talked about?

Jason Bernd 18:39
Yeah, it’s a significant disruption to our organization, we are a 501 c three, not for profit. So we are, you know, a not for profit entity. However, you know, we we are we do have nearly $5 billion of revenue. So we are a large organization with a significant amount of patient care revenue. And so I’ll give you an example my my hospital, which does take care of it’s primarily orthopedic and spine services. So most of that business is what you’d consider elective, where, you know, there’s a choice as to when patients have their surgeries, and our revenue in April was down 75% from traditional revenue. So there’s a significant impact to revenue to, you know, ours timbers get and so we’ve had to really work hard to make sure that we do what we can to take care of our team members. And then we as an organization, do have the benefit of our size. We did line up financing, just to make sure that we had, you know, working capital to make it through this place, but we’re proud that we have not had any furloughs, we have not had any displacements at this point with our with our health system. And I think that we are, came into this epidemic with or a pandemic with strong A strong, you know, financial health. And so I think will emerge from this still strong, but it has had a significant impact on our business operations. And even with some of the money that’s coming from the stimulus packages, that that is not, you know, that’s not going to cover the cost of these events of the things we stood up. I mean, if I just think about the supplies and equipment we’ve had to purchase, again, we we typically have 22 Medical ICU beds and in our main campus, and we were in a situation where we were going to be able to deploy 200 ICU beds. And so as you can imagine, the amount of equipment and supplies necessary to stand that up is pretty significant. So a large investment that the health systems have made to make sure that communities are safe, significant hit to the way that they’re, you know, economics work, since the cancelling of a lot of imaging and surgical services. And so this will be a long road to sort of recover from the effects of really pausing everything to make sure we’re ready to take care of Coronavirus.

Will Bachman 21:06
You talked earlier about you know how important it was to communicate and communicate maybe simple messages because you’re trying to change people’s behaviors. Talk to me a bit about as the leader of the hospital, what have you done to be out there and to be visible to be talking to people one on one or in small groups to make sure you’re kind of understand what’s going on in the front lines? What have you done in terms of that of either, you know, management, but walking around touring, and being just being out there and present?

Jason Bernd 21:39
Absolutely. So let’s say one thing is that being very intentional about making sure that that that I as well as other leaders are getting up to the floors to speak with the frontline team members to round on them to thank them to celebrate what they’re doing. And so, you know, you know, I would put my surgical mask on, and I’d get up there and I’d round and I’d help make sure that team member feels like this is a safe place, I’m gonna be up here, I’m going to be walking through with you. The other thing that that we did is for our kind of supervisors and above was we we would just have daily 15 to 20 minute check in each day just to debrief what’s happening to ask questions, see what questions their frontline team has think that really helped are like my team in particular, feel connected to feel like they were getting the latest information that they could. So just really quick. You know, huddles, it was challenging, because there’s all had to be in zoom, we, you know, we really took the social distancing, seriously, as well. And so almost all of our meetings have been in zoom, which is a tougher way to huddle. But then, in addition, you know, making sure every day that, that as an administrative leader, I’m masking and I’m getting up and I’m seeing the team members, and I’m communicating with them and talking with them. Another thing that we did that I think was really impactful was that we put whiteboards up at the front entrances to really celebrate the successes of taking care of our patients. And so as an example, I think, as of this morning, I think that we had a battle about 200 patients that have recovered and gone home from just our facility. And we had about 35 patients that were in an ICU that were on events that have recovered and have have come off that event and gone home. So each day we update those numbers just to make sure that people know the impact that they’re making every day that they’re seeing the progress to seeing that we’re winning, that we’re having great success treating patients and think that type of thing really helped encourage the team as they see things changing a lot and to remember that we’re having a lot of people recover and go home.

Will Bachman 23:59
We talked to them about how you been connected to the local Charlotte market. How have you been connecting with other hospital administrators? How have your clinical folks been connecting with other clinical folks across the country to sort of be sharing lessons learned as we go through this?

Jason Bernd 24:20
One of the things that I think makes me most proud is just you know, healthcare is in the business of taking care of people. And so the information sharing is pretty fantastic. And I particularly see that around physicians. And you know, our ICU doctors in Charlotte, North Carolina are communicating with physicians in Germany and physicians and Italy and physicians around the world, sharing best practices, learning, sharing ideas, and so we’ve seen significant amount of information sharing collaboration across the medical community, particularly physicians. There are a lot of means of connecting with other health systems. around the country. So the North Carolina Hospital Association organizes a weekly phone call, the American Hospital Association organizes phone calls as well. So there’s been a lot of great connection points to try to share information. In addition, I think that the states have really tried to help with some of the data transparency. So you can see reports, you know, whether it’s New York City, or whether it’s the state of Massachusetts, whether it’s the state of North Carolina, and you really have seen a desire to try to publish a lot of information so that people can see what’s going on and feel informed about hospitalizations about recovery about mortality. I think that type of information really helps to build trust, it also helps us plan resources and make sure that we’re allocating resources where they’re needed in case there are areas that do need some support. So a lot of communication, a lot of individuals spending a lot of time making sure that we’re trying to redeploy to support the areas that have the greatest need, and whether that’s in our local communities, or our state, or whether that’s across the country.

Will Bachman 26:05
I’d love to hear about what your lessons learned have been as you’ve as you’ve gone through this, and you’ve shared already, some of the things that you’ve been doing that, you know, work like the whiteboard out front, and your daily rounds and so forth. Any lessons learned that you’ve picked up that would help you maybe do something different next time?

Jason Bernd 26:26
Yeah, I’d say one of the things that was most impactful for me is my boss sought to Sham Madhu is the president of our market. He very clearly in the beginning said to folks, I want you all to recognize that this is an events. And this is going to have a beginning and it’s going to have a middle and it’s going to have an end, conserved from from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, he very clearly helped us recognize we’re going to we’re going to get through this and this events is going that this event is going to pass. So I think as a leader, just helping people feel the confidence the just that they’re solid ground, that we’re going to work on this, we’re going to work really hard. But we’re also going to start to think about recovery. So let’s say that was a motivating, inspirational just to kind of hear that. Remember that from the beginning. I think that the the other thing is recognizing that the emotional needs of your team are just as important as facts and figures and numbers. And so we’ve had a lot of organic things happen. We’ve had, you know, teams that decide to do a spiritual per huddle before their shifts, we have team members that share kind of messages of hope we have a lot of team members supporting and thanking each other. And really impactful has been the community, I do think that our frontline health care workers have had probably been fed, almost every meal for the last month lunch, we have a different community organization, that’s donating meals that’s donating snacks. And so there has been just a real degree of support and a real feeling of the communities behind us. And that really means a lot to the team that’s coming in every day. I think that the I think the other thing is recognizing the need to coordinate. So we talked a little bit about this, but planning and execution and to do that synchronize so that you can say to people, we’re right now we’re talking about a plan. And we will tell you when to execute. I think that type of language really helps in a in a dynamic changing environment. Because it gives it helps you avoid people jumping out and making changes early. Because when when one facility is doing something and another field facility is not at risk creates a lot of uncertainty and it just it people feel unsettled when things are not consistent. So I think that there’s we’re certainly really important, and I think, you know, again, as a leader, helping people also take time away. So we did create kind of an alpha Bravo team with our leadership team, you see a lot of physicians that did this. And we really made sure that we kind of checked on each other, checked in with folks and tried to make sure that people could get some time away to recharge the batteries. Because there was you know, significant amount of hours in different amount of work. People you know, it’s it’s, it’s a very, there’s a significant amount of stress you’re carrying in the background that you may not even realize. So I think as leaders really focusing on a code of sort of forcing each other to take, you know, a day off here and there to kind of get away to recover and come back recharge, I think was a really important leadership lesson as well.

Will Bachman 29:55
Talk to me some about how you have been working to plan for Kind of a gradual safe reopening. So you can start doing those elective surgeries again and start doing those other kinds of procedures. How are you planning around that?

Jason Bernd 30:10
So I’d say that we actually have, I think from the day that we we stopped elective surgeries, we’ve actually been planning for what the restart looks like. So I think another lesson is, again, this is in these event based situations, having the planning for recovery ongoing, so that the those wheels are in motion so that people’s mindset is ready for that. So I’d say that we have been planning restart all along. And we actually will, as an organization restart next week, with our kind of elective surgery starting up again, we’ll be selective, we’ll be testing all those patients as they come in, we’ll be making sure that we take care of patients that we expect, we’ll need sort of less hospital services just so we don’t overwhelm some of our critical care areas. So we’ll be we’ll be pragmatic about it, we’ll be safe. But I think that that planning has already started. And it does take a significant amount of effort to ramp things back up again. And again, there’s, there’s a real need to communicate, there’s a real need to be consistent, so that people feel safe. And, you know, and that people are, yeah, it’s a little strong like that people are sort of following best practice guidelines, for example, there is a tendency to want to wear the most the safest protective equipment for all patients. But if we’re going to be testing patients for COVID, and ruling out that they do not have COVID, then we need to remember that we can use our normal sterile precautions for those patients. So really trying to help lead people through to recognize that you know, there’s going to be a day we’re not for all not going to be masking, there is going to be a day where we’re all not going to be wearing a 95 masks, or we’re taking care of these patients. And so how do we start to, to use the what we know, use testing to make sure that people start to reestablish those behaviors of using standard precautions for patients that we know do not have COVID. And I think that helps demystified the COVID a little bit, because because there certainly is a level of reaction of wanting to be as safe as possible. And sometimes that is a little bit overkill. And sometimes it actually can potentially cause other challenges and delays if you’re using the highest level of precaution where you really don’t need it.

Will Bachman 32:35
Yeah. And what is the status of testing now? Are you able to do a test and get an answer in a short amount of time?

Jason Bernd 32:44
We do, we have several platforms that are doing rapid test turnarounds. And so there are several different vendors that that are providing that. several hospitals have in house molecular labs today been able to do in house testing all along, we started with, with an outside reference lab company that did our testing. And as technology and innovation has come, we’ve been able to put in house testing in our facilities, we can get testing turnaround in 30 minutes for patients that are in the hospital. And then what we do is sort of plan around, you know, what criteria to use for rapid testing, versus 24 hour testing turnaround. And then we just make sure that we’re using those tests in the appropriate manner in the appropriate place. And you know, each test has a different, you know, specificity and false positives, false negatives. And so you just really look at that to make sure you’re using the best information to make the best decisions for patient care. But I’d say that early on testing was a significant challenge. So just to give you an example, at our peak, we basically, we would have just as many patients who are waiting tests, as we had have patients who are positive. So we had a pretty significant burden in the hospitals where you didn’t know if they had COVID or not. And but that I was very proud of, you know, testing organizations around the country that we pretty rapidly saw testing times drop, we saw the real time testing come online. And so we’re at a point now where really, we can roll out and COVID for any patient that comes in to the hospital within 30 minutes. It makes a big difference in US conserving personal protective equipment, making the right clinical decisions on where to put these places and how to take care of them. So the testing is significantly better. Do you think we are working with the county and the state to understand what does it look like to have rapid testing antibody testing available for the broader public, just so that we can do some tracing and isolation if we do loosen things up in the state. I think that type of thing would be a best practice to try to come off of some of the more If you’re staying home restrictions have been in place.

Will Bachman 35:04
So you’d be able to, you know, just kind of test the patient and and if you need to, you know, do a procedure that day you can, you can do it within half an hour, and I guess they stay isolated in a room or something for half an hour with a mask on. And then if they don’t have COVID, you can bring them into the hospital, and they don’t necessarily need to wear a mask. And what about rights? What about sort of, I suppose that would be anybody who’s going in. So if they want to bring a you know, a visitor or something wants to go in the hospital, you, you’re maybe putting a much tighter clearance on that as well.

Jason Bernd 35:36
So we, for several weeks have used basically paper based screening for guests. While so sorry, the backup, we actually we have visitor restriction. So basically, we’ve restricted visitors. So really, for the safety of patients, for guests, for team members, we really are at a situation where it’s mostly end of life situations where guests are allowed to come in for the most part, we’re really restricting folks to have no visitors and encouraging them to not come in a lot of a lot of a lot of patients, even if they come in for surgery, their family members are waiting in the car because they just feel more comfortable doing that. They certainly are welcome into the hospital, we have safe space for them. But as you can imagine, there’s just there’s just been a lot of desire for people just to have social distancing in place. So we do have visitor restrictions across all the hospitals across all health systems in Charlotte, that I just think helps reduce the volume of traffic in the hospitals, which I think has been really helpful. And then when patients come in, when sorry, when sorry, when guests come in, when team members come in, we are checking temperatures, we are asking them questions, screening them to see if they have potential symptoms. And, you know, we are asking them to you know, wear a mask if they’re coming into our facility just for the safety of our guests and our teams.

Will Bachman 37:03
Fantastic. Well, Jason, this has been incredibly informative. And I also say very hopeful to hear about all the amazing things that your facility has done and how you’ve been working to protect both patients as well as your staff and team members. I’ll include a link to the hospital in the shownotes for people that want to kind of follow up and thank thanks so much for being on the show.

Jason Bernd 37:30
Thank you Well appreciate the time and the opportunity to catch up