NASHVILLE — A Galion native is a key player in the battle to combat the spread of COVID-19 at one of the country’s most well-known hospitals.
Dr. Jared M. O’Leary, Interim Co-Medical Director of Cardiovascular ICU at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., is part of a team of ICU doctors and directors meeting daily to prepare the 1,100-bed facility for what’s to come. Whatever that may be.
“I’ve been really proud of our institution and how we responded to the crisis,” said Dr. O’Leary, who is also Associate Program Director for Interventional Cardiology Fellowship at Vanderbilt. “We kind of feel that for the most part we’re prepared and now we’re hunkered down for the worst. Hunkered down and waiting.”
Dr. O’Leary, a 2002 Galion High School graduate, said he assumed his new role a few weeks ago when the nationally-ranked medical center ramped up its efforts to treat a possible influx of coronavirus patients by building a new wing in a parking garage separated from the main emergency room. A “garage ER” as it’s been called.
The “garage ER” was erected to evaluate patients and staf with suspected COVID-19 infection.
Half of the beds in that 100-bed unit – which has been deemed a hospital within the hospital – are being designated for ICU patients, he said. Since the medical center is already treating dozens of COVID-19 patients on any given day, he said expanding the ICU in preparation for a spike in cases has been key from the get-go.
Vanderbilt, he said, recognized early on that they had the capability of cohorting these patients after capitalizing on what colleagues were learning in Italy, Seattle and especially New York City.
“They listened and recognized that the outbreak wasn’t going to be small,” he said. “Their efforts have been pretty Herculean.”
The medical center, which usually has a higher than 90-percent occupancy rate, has purposely reduced its census to about 80-percent, Dr. O’Leary said, with the postponement of elective surgeries and the expectation that the Nashville area could see the worst from the global pandemic within two weeks.
He said the medical center already has a stockpile of much-needed ventilators, masks and personal protective gear, some of which has been “marshalled” from its nearby children’s hospital. In addition, it has implemented a “waterfall plan,” a tiered approach meaning no one unit is allowed to reach maximum capacity.
Dr. O’Leary, who also serves as an assistant professor of medicine at the academic medical complex, said VUMC has been prudent about where and when equipment is used. Even the hospital’s N-95 respirators are being re-sterilized, he said, through intense beams of ultraviolet light so that they may be used again.
The Galion grad, who earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Case Western Reserve University, headed to Vanderbilt University for medical school. He completed his residency at Harvard in both internal medicine and pediatrics before heading back to Nashville.
The son of Dr. Art O’Leary of Mansfield and Mary Griffith of Galion, he completed back-to-back fellowships at Vanderbilt, one in cardiology and the other in interventional cardiology. In 2014, he married the former Chelsea Jenney, also of Galion.
The coronavirus crisis, he said, could take months to play out if it hits in waves as world health officials predict. The important thing, he said, is to not downplay the threat or the seriousness of the disease, but rather learn from it and plan for the future.
“The pandemic is going to look a lot different in different geographies in terms of magnitude and in terms of timing,” he said. “Vanderbilt has been pro-active, but we’re hoping all this planning is not necessary.”