As Hurricane Michael starts to batter the Florida coast, one Texas-based hospital system revisited the lessons learned from the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey last year, which showed that even the best risk management plans cannot account for every contingency.
Memorial Hermann Health System has 15 acute care hospitals, more than 26,000 employees and annual emergency visits of more than 564,000 in South Texas, Charlotte Spence Koenig, system director of enterprise risk management in Houston, noted at the American Society for Health Care Risk Management’s annual conference in Nashville on Tuesday.
“We had no idea what we were facing because we live in Houston and we have hurricanes and we drill for hurricanes and we’re ready for hurricanes so it was natural procedure,” she said. But Harvey “was not the normal hurricane for us. We had water coming from every which direction and that we aren’t used to.”
Harvey stalled and dropped significant rainfall in the area over a five-day period, with the highest rainfall amount totaling 48.20 inches – the highest rainfall amount in a single storm for…
