In the midst of staying on the cutting edge of coronavirus research and providing world-class patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins Medicine has found a way to keep its employees healthy and also coming to work: a systemwide call center.

As cases of COVID-19 ramped up, employees flooded Johns Hopkins Occupational Health Services (OHS) offices with calls about symptoms and exposure. Should I come to work or stay home? If I come to work, do I need to wear a mask? If my partner is being tested for COVID-19, do I need to be tested?

Handling this influx required an all-hands-on-deck approach, as OHS teams across the health system managed these calls on top of orienting new hires, performing health screenings and other everyday duties.

On March 17, OHS on the East Baltimore campus launched a call center with support from Ambulatory Services and oversight from Bimal Ashar, clinical director of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and Kimberly Peairs, clinical director of general internal medicine at Green Spring Station. Nurses staffed the call center, using an algorithm developed by Healthcare Epidemiology and Infection Control (HEIC) to triage employees’ calls and guide them on next steps.

“Our biggest focus is to keep as many employees working while making sure they are safe to work alongside their co-workers and with patients,” said Deborah Dooley, OHS clinical nurse manager.

But as the number of COVID-19 cases and public anxiety increased, so did the volume of phone calls, the desire for testing, and the hours of operation. Just a week after opening, the call center expanded to serve the entire Johns Hopkins Medicine community.

This newly established Employee COVID-19 Call Center (ECCC) moved to the Anne and Mike Armstrong Medical Education Building on the East Baltimore campus, which allowed for more volunteers and better social distancing in a larger space. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the ECCC takes calls from employees in Florida, home health providers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, students on the university’s Homewood campus, and everywhere in between.

Within just a week, the expanded call center received more than 300 daily calls, which were answered by more than 50 Johns Hopkins nurses, physicians, nursing students and medical students. One volunteer, surgical nurse Maya Lee, noticed an uptick in call volume. Since elective surgeries were canceled, she and some of her colleagues have transitioned from working at Green Spring Station to taking calls in the call center. “If we can’t help at our surgery center, we might as well help in any way we can,” she says.

Renee Demski, vice president for quality improvement at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and OHS incident command chief in the JHM Unified Command Center, was integral in getting the resources needed to expand the call center systemwide. “ECCC is the function that we created to ensure that our employees remain safe amidst the COVID-19 pandemic,” she says. “The goal is to return employees to work when appropriate and keep them off work when appropriate, while continuing to keep our patients safe.”