Bill McKeon

And that really took for us because remember each of these institutions worked independent from one another.

They don't share data with one another.

And so that was a real big accomplishment for us to allow them to give the data to the Texas Medical Center at the time.

And that trust really opened the door for many other opportunities of understanding.

And that really built the trust with each other because

With all of us sharing our data in real time and knowing how things were happening, people really didn't understand the depth of this problem.

And so I think what it allowed us to do when each of those institutions trusted themselves enough to give the data to us centrally and to see the benefits of it, that was really set a whole new tone in how we work together.

A lot of people forget during this pandemic

that our hospitals are usually at 80, 90% for just the normal challenges disease brings on in our community.

And people travel from around the world to come here for that care.

And so we had that on top of a pandemic.

And so one of the things about social capital is once we establish that trust baseline,

to really work with each other, it was amazing to see how we would set up our testing.

We would really talk collectively about how can we set up the testing, because remember, it was first mandated to come in to our hospitals who were already taxed with not only providing care for non-COVID, but now COVID patients.

And now we became the cornerstone for testing in the entire country.

And it was really the great efforts and investments made by Baylor College of Medicine and University of Texas and Houston Methodist that really gave us a testing capacity.

So we knew in real time how many people were coming in that had COVID, while back in the day, and that's only a year ago, we'd wait for those tests to go to Washington and come back six weeks later.

And so we had to have the real-time intelligence to know where this virus was, the presence of it in various communities.

And so now we've really shifted knowing where those hotspots are.

We've shifted our mobile units to where we deliver vaccine.