Page 32 - Healthcare News Sept.-Oct. 2020

HEALTHCARE HEROES OF WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
user. Partly because of the logistics of billing and partly because the need was so pressing, IALS essentially gave the shields away.
“The differentiator between UMass and every other organization I’ve
ever worked at — in both industry
and academia — is this spirit of collaboration,” Reinhart told HCN. “I’ve been at organizations where it’s very hard to get collaborations working across departmental boundaries. It’s much more self-contained, focused
on individual greatness as opposed
to collective greatness. That’s the difference I see at UMass Amherst — people across organizational boundaries will jump in and help you.”
When the pandemic hit, IALS’ culture and understanding of interdisciplinary work was especially valuable, and eight or nine response teams began working on individual projects, he explained, “some with greater and some with lesser success, but all of them with the best of intentions: to make a difference with the problems that were facing us as a society, using whatever resources
we could apply to them.”
One early project took aim at a
worldwide mask shortage. Not all
face masks can be safely sterilized
and reused, but Professor Richard Peltier’s team demonstrated that hydrogen-peroxide sterilization for N95 respirators does, in fact, work. Using state-of-the-art pollution instruments to measure whether microscopic particles can pass through the mask after it’s sterilized, the results showed no real difference in filtration between a new mask and a sterilized one.
In another project, Baystate Health resident physician Dr. Mat Goebel
and respiratory specialist Kyle Walsh contacted the College of Engineering for help with ventilators. Regular, 10-foot ventilator cables were on extreme
back order, and longer cables, which would provide added safety to staff
by increasing distance and reducing the need for PPE, did not exist. UMass engineers were able to fabricate a 50-foot cable that was compatible with Baystate’s ventilators, and contacted Michigan-based Amphenol Sine Systems, who agreed to design and fabricate the longer cables.
“It’s a really intriguing model,” Reinhart said of the collaboration that went into each project. “It could be a model of the future, to allow interdisciplinary work to function on
“The differentiator between UMass and every other organization I’ve ever worked at —
in both industry and academia — is th”is spirit of collaboration.
a campus that by necessity has these organizational boundaries.”
Another team set up local production of viral transport media (VTM) for COVID-19 clinical testing. As testing ramped up nationwide, the solution used to keep COVID-19 samples safe during transport was in short supply, and local hospitals contacted Reinhart for help.
Within one week, IALS had produced, tested, and distributed enough VTM
to test 600 patients, before scaling up production and delivery to meet the needs of frontline workers across the state. The campus has enlisted more than 60 volunteers who produce,
test, package and distribute VTM, and have provided hundreds of thousands of vials to seven regional hospitals and healthcare facilities and the Massachusetts COVID-19 Response Command Center.
“That project has grown because
the need was much larger than anticipated,” Reinhart said. “It was good to see we had so many people prepared to put in their time to help, and great to see that people who had run out of the ability to test were back doing testing. We ended up doing a good thing.”
The latest project is a high- throughput testing facility where IALS can generate up to 5,000 COVID-19
IALS
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