CEO Report Notes from the July 31, 2024 Board Meeting

The following is an outline of comments from the CEO at the recent Redwood Coast Medical Services (RCMS) Board Meeting.
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Community Outreach

• On Sunday, July 21, there was an evacuation drill at the Sea Ranch that was coordinated by various Sonoma County emergency response and law enforcement organizations. RCMS was invited to be part of that activity and was present at the command center during the drill. This was to simulate a real emergency evacuation. And along with other organizations, our role was to understand what RCMS could be doing in such situations. As part of this drill, we discussed having a CB radio in RCMS so that we can communicate with the command center during an evacuation emergency.
• On a similar note, on Saturday, August 10th, there will be a Coastal Fire and Safety fair at Sea Ranch. RCMS will have a booth there. We will provide various handouts and information, such as a medical checklist for emergencies, refrigerator magnets with local medical emergency contact information, patient portal access information, etc. We are also planning to have a clinical support person to do blood pressure check-ups and associated information sharing.

 
Organizational/Operational update

• Some comments about our Pharmacy. It is almost a year now since we had our soft opening of the Pharmacy. I am reporting to you that the Pharmacy is doing well now. We are averaging about 75 to 80 unique prescriptions filled daily and we have done up to about 120 prescriptions in one day. It now has a drug formulary that covers most of the prescription drugs including psychiatric drugs and continues to add more to the formulary. The pharmacy also gives various vaccinations such as TDAP, RSV, shingles vaccination, COVID boosters, etc. We will also do flu shots through the pharmacy starting in late August. The Pharmacy is a success story for RCMS and the community.
• We also started a detailed assessment of our computing and communication infrastructure. From our desktops, to our servers, to our local area network, to our wide area network -- both from a logical and physical design perspective are being analyzed as we speak. As we move forward to a more technology-dependent clinical service delivery model such as cloud-based NextGen, a universally deployed patient portal, and seamless information exchange between various labs and hospitals we work with – our technology infrastructure becomes more and more important. We need to establish a strategic plan for this infrastructure. That initiative is starting. Obviously, we have to work with the budgetary constraints.

 
Facilities Update

• We signed up with a Capital Campaign Consulting group to help us with our Capital Campaign. We vetted three sets of people before selecting this organization. Their name is DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. They are a very experienced organization helping entities large and small in major capital campaigns. We held our first face-to-face meeting with them last week. More details to come.
• In a related topic, we are having some initial discussions with an organization that focuses on solar power, microgrids, and related technologies for the healthcare service delivery field. We will analyze to see if we can incorporate this as part of our facilities expansion initiative.

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