Keller hears Evan officials talk testing

“We’re concerned because we are moving into flu season,” Aucker said. “You are going to begin to have people come in and you are going to say do they have influenza ‘A,’ influenza ‘B’ or COVID. Our ability to test for that is going to increase here again because people are going to come in and be ill with something and what is it. We are concerned about what is coming over the winter even if we don’t see a huge increase in COVID.”

Angela Lahr, ECH vice president of clinical operations, said larger local hospitals are allocated COVID test kits they can distribute to rural hospitals as needed. But ECH gets less than 30 one-hour tests per week from one vendor and about 200 per week from another.

Lahr said the alternate COVID testing site, though important to the community, presented a challenge to keep operating.

“It’s become more and more difficult to acquire the supplies needed,” Lahr said. “We are virtually piecing kits together from multiple sources.”

In-house tests required specific transport media and swabs, as well as testing reagents to complete the test. Lahr said one instrument used by the hospital has the capacity of testing over 400 per day but they do not have the kits to test at that rate.

The round-table talk with Keller was also attended by William Anderson, ECH executive vice president and COO, James Stopper, ECH vice president of finance.

Anderson said since the end of June there has been a spike in tests since the end of June.

“Resources for us are fairly limited not just from a supply but from a labor perspective to be able to run tests through and to collect that many tests,” he said. “We’re fortunate that we’ve been able to manage it to this point but there are stressors on the system that continue to pop up.”

Keller said allocation of the supply chain will be traced back to see how decisions are made, provided the resources themselves are available.

“There have been a lot of issues with supply chains within the medical field,” Keller said. “But also outside the medical field when people are looking for things and have to get them.”

Keller said efforts were being taken to ensure personal protective equipment was sourced domestically.

Imported pharmaceuticals have been similarly in the spotlight, but Keller said returning them to domestic production would be a longer-term proposition.

“There has been a lot of dialogue on that to the point where it is going to be something that is going to take us a little bit of time to do,” Keller said. “There is much interest from the administration and Congress to make sure that we have not just pharmaceuticals but other things that we’ve come to know that need to be brought back.”

Keller noted he introduced an amendment to the Natoional Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to return a supply chain for tungsten from China to the United States.