Transforming a Hotel into a Hospital: The Playbook Solution for Converting a Hotel into a Full All Hazards Hospital During Medical Surge with ICU and Med-Surg Capabilities

Summary: During times of medical surge, alternative care sites (ACFs) offer additional bed space for expansion of inpatient services. However, traditional ACFs often fail to have adequate infrastructure to support robust clinical operations (lack of adequate wraparound services, such as lab and radiology) and cannot usually provide anything other than subacute services. Hotels are most closely proximate to hospitals in many ways: individual rooms with toilets and showers, space for a kitchen, adequate elevators to accommodate stretchers, PA systems, etc. Medium-sized and convention-sized hotels could be converted to hospital space, offering the potential for wraparound services that allow admission of all patient types, including ICU and general med-surg patients. This research was funded by the US Department of Defense as part of the “Modular/Convertible Capability Pilot Project” to increase medical surge capabilities and capacities to care for our Nation’s combat casualties and to inform nationwide changes to the existing National Disaster Medical System (NDMS). Since ACFs operate outside of traditional hospital buildings, hotels present a viable option for an ACF. The result of this project was Team Colorado’s Hotel2Hospital Playbook, which provides instructions and guidance for the just in-time conversion (within 2-4 weeks) of any hotel into a hospital. The Playbook includes strategies to select and engage a Partner Hotel; guidelines for using, augmenting, and adding to the existing hotel infrastructure to create a hospital-like care setting; an approach for converting hotel rooms into patient care rooms, clinical equipment, and staffing needs; and how to establish services such as Lab, Pharmacy, and Radiology in a hotel facility. The H2H Playbook includes architectural drawings, engineering plans, checklists, and other resources that hospital emergency management personnel and other emergency preparedness professionals can use.