Innovator Awards: Co-Third-Place Winning Team: Mount Sinai Morningside: Developing a Daily Management and Incident Command Center

Leaders at Mount Sinai Morningside, an urban community hospital in New York City, sought to design a command center to manage both emergency incidents and daily operations. Although the command center was not originally intended to address pandemic issues, the hospitals’ information network has provided its leaders with real-time data for efficient and effective decision making in the current environment.

A team came together to review the current information reports that were available to leaders and managers and a gap analysis exercise that focused on what information was needed to manage and what information was missing. The team chose to include data into the new information system based on new attributes including real-time accessibility, definable targets, and ability to trigger standard work or action. The team then worked together with their information technology colleagues and pulled the new data points from their electronic health record (EHR) and simply used 10 television screens to display the information, which updates every four to five minutes. The completed project was dubbed the Daily Management and Incident Command Center (DMC).

The electronic dashboards are used to drive the conversations in the organization’s daily multidisciplinary safety huddle and seamlessly allow sharing of information with the DMC. The information framework allows staff to rapidly surge and pivot with confidence, knowing that the right information is in the right place at the right time to be operationalized by the right people.