Healthcare Ready 2020 COVID-19 Impact Report

Healthcare Ready exists to support our nation’s healthcare supply chain during crises like what we’re experiencing today. Established 14 years ago, we are a disaster preparedness and response nonprofit organization that serves as a crucial hub for coordinating donations and shipments of medicines, protective gear and other supplies to those in need. 

For Healthcare Ready, the multiplier effect of pandemic response and disaster response has underscored the critical role that the public/private partnerships we have forged can play in saving lives, particularly for communities that are underserved and medically fragile. Read below for a summary of our work this year as we’ve responded to organizations and patients during the pandemic, historic wildfires and active hurricane season. Learn about our efforts to build community resilience, and strengthen the supply chain with our partners, and how you can help support our work.

We leveraged our public/private partnership, and expanded that partnership to a Task Force to coordinate a group of industry leaders committed to address supply chain and healthcare challenges faced during the pandemic.

This Task Force has been maintained to help coordinate solutions to ensure that medicines and medical supplies continue to flow to facilities and regions with the greatest need. We established open lines of communication with FEMA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to encourage real-time information sharing on issues related to end-to-end supply chain coordination. We communicated with medical distributors, pharmaceutical and healthcare industry partners, which are focused on helping hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes and home health agencies to work towards uninterrupted patient care during the pandemic.

We coordinated more than 15 million donations of PPE to frontline workers and patients, helping to protect those who were at the greatest risk for potential exposure to COVID-19.

Through our partnership with BIO’s Coronavirus Hub, we publicly shared valuable resources, and we vetted suppliers with the National Governors’ Association and AHRMM, the leading professional membership group for the healthcare supply chain. Additionally, we worked with FEMA and HHS to streamline donation routing and distribute items to more than 22 states, including Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and seven tribal nations.

We identified information gaps in marginalized communities around COVID-19, and created and provided key pandemic preparedness resources to community leaders.

These resources helped them communicate with people who are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and natural disasters. Resources included FAQs, toolkits, tip sheets, educational videos, infographics and social media messaging so that religious and community leaders, educators and local officials could reach out to better inform and protect these vulnerable populations. 

We helped local communities stay up to date and prepare for impending natural disasters while coping with COVID-19.

 We issued more than 50 timely situation reports and threat assessments, and widely shared resources and information on social media in English and Spanish.

We debunked myths and misunderstandings around management of chronic conditions and personal treatment plans during the pandemic.

We hosted dozens of virtual private sector convenings, workshops, webinars and trainings to help local communities and emergency management cope with and react to COVID-19. This included panel-style discussions with public health officials, pharmacists, care providers, and pharmaceutical supply chain leaders that were open and available to the public.

We empowered patients by providing them with information regarding open pharmacies and medical facilities in their neighborhoods so they wouldn’t experience disruptions due to COVID-19, hurricanes or wildfires.

These online sites enable the public to easily access critical medications via Rx Open, Rx on the Run and Map Your Meds. 

We became a trusted resource for reporters, helping to clarify the different components and pressures on our healthcare supply chain while providing key guidance.

Healthcare Ready’s expertise has been featured in the Associated Press, with the article appearing in more than 150 news outlets; we discussed healthcare preparedness on C-SPAN; talked about what keeps the experts up at night in The Chronicle of Philanthropy; provided tips on how to safely run errands in Fortune magazine; and discussed pandemic burnout in The Atlantic, in addition to participating in hundreds of other interviews. Media impressions of the organization have totaled nearly 3,000 since January.

We gained additional partners and attracted resources to help bolster our efforts.

Project HOPE awarded Healthcare Ready with its “2020 Global Healthcare Partner,” and we received more than $1 million in grants and donations from generous donors such as PhRMA, Daiichi Sankyo Inc., the Walmart Foundation, Stanley Black & Decker, and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, among others. Healthcare Ready is grateful for their partnership and generous support that makes our efforts to “strengthen, safeguard and respond,” possible during this unprecedented time. If you’d like to learn more about Healthcare Ready and how you can support our work, please click on the button below.

End of Year Thank You Message and Video

Healthcare Ready presents a brief staff video and infographic highlighting the successes and challenges of responding to disasters during a pandemic. 

Learn more about Healthcare Ready’s role in securing our healthcare supply chain to protect patients across the nation.

RESOURCE CENTER
COVID-19 response

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