Jason Persoff, MD, SFHM, of the College of Colorado Faculty of Drugs demonstrates a mockup of a Degree 2 intensive care unit constructed inside a sequence of visitor rooms on the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Convention Heart in Aurora, Colorado, on July 22, 2025. Partitions between rooms had been knocked right down to create the ICU area. Persoff is co-principal investigator of the Hotel2Hospital analysis undertaking. Credit score: Mark Harden | College of Colorado Division of Emergency Drugs
When JD Naasz, RN, a UCHealth emergency division nurse, arrived at a giant resort close to the College of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, he was astounded. “The first day I walked in, I thought, ‘This isn’t a hotel. This is a hospital,'” he stated.
In a couple of weeks, components of two flooring of the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Convention Heart had been reworked from visitor and assembly rooms into a totally outfitted prototype hospital, with affected person rooms, two intensive care models, a nursing station, lab, pharmacy, radiology middle, and digital affected person monitoring programs.
It was a “proof of concept” take a look at executed as a part of an ongoing three-year undertaking referred to as Hotel2Hospital, led by the CU Division of Emergency Drugs.
The analysis initiative is creating methods to rapidly convert a resort right into a hospital within the occasion of a sudden surge of sufferers attributable to warfare, pandemic, or pure catastrophe. UCHealth, the division’s medical accomplice, is a collaborator.
In an excessive makeover, crews put in new flooring on high of the resort carpet, put in a community of pipes for oxygen, rolled in beds and gear, and arrange sturdy IT infrastructure and satellite tv for pc wi-fi connectivity. After which groups of medical doctors, nurses, and technicians arrived, taking a “test drive” in an area that regarded and functioned uncannily like a hospital.
Besides, that’s, for a couple of key variations: one bin within the pharmacy contained sweet as an alternative of capsules. And the sufferers had been medical manikins—lifelike fashions designed to duplicate human anatomy and physiology. One, named Tony, stored the suppliers on their toes, simulating a heart-rate spike one minute, indications of sepsis the following.
Many functions
Hotel2Hospital’s leaders are Charles Little, DO, FACEP, professor of emergency drugs and medical director of emergency preparedness at UCHealth College of Colorado Hospital (UCH); and Jason Persoff, MD, SFHM, affiliate professor within the CU Division of Drugs’s Division of Hospital Drugs and UCH’s assistant director of emergency preparedness.
Little and Persoff have often collaborated on analysis into preparedness and response throughout well being emergencies.
The undertaking started in 2023 with analysis into methods to create alternate care services to complement current hospitals throughout a affected person surge. The division requested analysis groups to contemplate an overseas-conflict state of affairs the place 1,000 fight casualties per day for 100 days had been getting back from abroad needing care.
The expectation was for the services, full with medical-surgical (med-surg) and intensive care models, to be up and operating in two to 4 weeks and be able to working for a number of months.
“The military paid for this, but there are many other applications,” Little stated as he greeted guests in a resort assembly room transformed into an ICU.
Along with the protection mission, he stated, a transformed resort might be helpful in affected person surges attributable to a home disaster, corresponding to one other pandemic, a pure catastrophe, a terrorist assault, or perhaps a hearth taking an area hospital out of fee.
In accordance with Protection Division projections, a serious affected person surge brought about both by a nationwide well being emergency or abroad fight might deplete nationwide hospital-bed capability inside 10 to 12 days.
Classes from COVID-19
“When you look at emergency preparedness in general, one of the weakest areas is the ability to rapidly expand hospital capacity during times of disaster,” Persoff says. “And that was really brought to the fore for the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Throughout the early days of the pandemic, he says, “everybody was working towards opening up alternate care services to broaden hospital capability. Right here, that was carried out on the Colorado Conference Heart, which was arrange as a really massive, 1,000-bed facility. Nevertheless it by no means noticed a affected person. For one factor, the affected person numbers began to go down, but additionally, it was unwieldy to work in that area.
“All the bathrooms are along the outside walls, and getting patients there from the centralized pods was quite problematic, even if they were ambulatory.”
Persoff credit Little with developing with the concept of utilizing a big convention resort as an alternative choice to a conference middle or a giant tent in surge conditions.
There are lots of benefits to utilizing a conference-scale resort, Persoff says, together with pre-existing personal rooms with particular person loos and HVAC, massive kitchen and laundry services, loading docks and freight elevators, assembly rooms sufficiently big to accommodate ICUs, area for administrative features, hearth code necessities much like these of a hospital, and building sturdy sufficient to assist heavy gear.
“What sets this model apart is the ability to provide full ICU and med-surg care,” Persoff says. “Most other sites for alternative care facilities are very limited in what they can offer.” He says a resort additionally provides higher an infection management and the flexibility to isolate sufferers.
Assembling workforce Colorado
The primary part of the three-year Hotel2Hospital undertaking was to develop a preliminary model of a playbook detailing rapidly convert a resort into a short lived hospital.
To work on the initiative, Little and Persoff assembled what they name “Team Colorado,” together with medical personnel in addition to consultants in undertaking administration, structure and engineering, building, and hospital operations. Additionally they carried out a sequence of tabletop workout routines to validate and refine the playbook.
The aim of the undertaking’s second 12 months was to remodel a resort right into a simulated hospital as a trial run to check the playbook’s ideas in addition to to provide UCHealth suppliers expertise within the facility and to guage medical workflows.
The workforce selected the Hyatt Regency Aurora for the take a look at. The location appeared best, given its proximity to UCH and the CU Anschutz campus. The target was to deal with the resort as a brand new “tower” of UCH, plugged into UCHealth’s digital data programs.
“The nurses who’ve been over here working say that this is like working at their hospital, so the amount of extra training and orientation is almost zero,” Persoff says. “That’s exactly what we wanted.”
Additionally, numerous teams—together with medical professionals—got excursions of the transformed resort area and had been requested to guage what they noticed.
To check how briskly the conversion might be accomplished, contractors weren’t allowed to pre-order something they would want for the undertaking, Persoff says. Additionally, due to UCHealth’s current contracts with rental firms, medical provides and gear might be gathered rapidly. “Everything we threw at the rental companies, they could have for us within a day,” he says.
‘This might save numerous lives’
On July 25, after about two weeks of coaching workout routines and demonstration excursions, crews started tearing down the mock hospital—eradicating flooring, refinishing partitions, and restoring the Hyatt Regency Aurora to its unique operate as a resort.
In 12 months three of Hotel2Hospital, beginning in October, the workforce will replace the playbook with classes realized from the Aurora demonstration, Persoff says. Researchers additionally plan to satisfy with native officers in choose cities to debate how the playbook’s ideas will be utilized of their communities.
“From a disaster preparedness perspective, this is probably the most impactful project I’ll ever work on,” Persoff says. “Because of this work, we now have a blueprint to turn a hotel into a hospital-level care site in just two to four weeks. This could save countless lives during a crisis.”
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Hotel2Hospital: An excessive makeover reveals how a affected person surge might be dealt with in a disaster (2025, July 30)
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