On September 18, Dr. Mitch Katz, President and CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals, shared with California Improvement Network (CIN) partners at the fall CIN partner meeting about his experience leading the largest public health care system in the United States as it became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. How did New York City's hospitals adapt to care for 4,000 COVID-19 patients in the span of six weeks at a point in time when both testing and knowledge of infection control for the coronavirus were limited?

In this candid conversation with Healthforce Center at UCSF Director Dr. Sunita Mutha, Dr. Katz revealed that central to leading in a crisis is acknowledging that you can't operate as you typically do. He gave examples of making hard decisions and providing care differently, including changing staff to patient ratios and having to get staff on board with delivering care in a completely different way than they were trained to do in order to address the crisis at hand and keep patients alive. It's an open and engaging look into how innovation and change in health care happened in real time, and how we can all prepare for whatever is coming next.

Watch the engaging 90-minute conversation with Dr. Katz, Dr. Mutha, and CIN partners here.

The California Improvement Network (CIN) is a project of the California Health Care Foundation and managed by Healthforce Center at UCSF.

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