Photo showing hospital beds lined up in the Samson Pavilion waiting for patients
Patient beds in the courtyard

School of Medicine’s Alan Tartakoff details a pressing need for a new patient allocation system

Managing Patient Load

New York Times: Alan Tartakoff, a professor of pathology at the School of Medicine, offered thoughts on the pressing need for hospitals to adopt a new patient allocation system, writing: “…public health infrastructure is at risk. The hospitals of the world need an equivalent of the electrical power grid that reallocates power in response to demand. In our case, it is the patients who would be reallocated in times of extreme need,” Tartakoff wrote, in a letter signed by 52 other medical doctors and Ph.D.s from around the world: “Reallocation would be based on a broad-based tabulation of how close each hospital was to capacity. Before any prospective patient entered a hospital that was near capacity, he or she would be redirected to a secondary site. This would require a continuously updated allocation registry, somewhat akin to what is done for patients who need organ transplants.”