FEVER PITCH
Houston Methodist’s executive VP, Roberta Schwartz, on COVID-19 crisis management as a full-time job
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Houston Methodist’s Roberta Schwartz held down two jobs, as executive vice president of the health system’s flagship hospital in the Texas Medical Center and as chief innovation officer for Houston Methodist System.
For the last 10 months, she’s added another full-time job to juggle: “incident commander,” if you will, over Houston Methodist’s COVID-19 response.
From sourcing personal protective equipment to managing demand for testing to figuring out a solution to vaccine shortages, Schwartz has her hand in nearly every aspect of the pandemic response — while finding time to make rounds at the hospital and see her staff.
The Chronicle talked to Schwartz about what it’s like to be at the center of a global health crisis.
Q: Tell us — what is “incident command”?
A: I pulled the short straw. After being here for 20 years and doing countless numbers of disasters alongside Marc (Boom, CEO of Houston Methodist System), whether it was (Hurricane) Harvey, Alison or Ike, you become a seasoned incident commander. I’m the organizing force behind our response to the pandemic.
You have that structure so that there is a unified way of doing things in a pandemic. You can do it quickly and uniformly, and you can really work your way through this disaster.
In incident command, you lean on very different section chiefs. It’s almost like a symphony — now it’s the tubas’ turn, now it’s the violins’ turn. As incident commander, your job is to say, “Hey, I don’t have enough flutes in the flute section and I need to have you guys play a lot louder.” You move around the “orchestra,” pulling people you need from the organization.
The job of incident command is not just dealing with a problem in front of you. It’s also thinking about the problems other people are not looking at, and how we’re going to start dealing with them in a month.
Q: Walk me through some of the big events of the last year.
A: In March, all we were worried about was PPE and our entire focus was on the supply chain. Then incident command became all about testing. How are we going to get everyone tested now that we have a test for this? We had this quietness when everything was closed. Were you going to go to your doctor? Could we start surgeries again?
And then it became about the summer surge and how we turn the tide on it. It came back down, and then we waited for the fall to kick up. Now we’ve layered on monoclonal antibodies, which is a big new treatment scenario for us. Half of incident command at this point is all about the vaccine.
Q: Before the pandemic, what were you doing in your roles at the hospital system?