Covid Skunkworks

Asante and Covid Skunkworks work to solve a shortage of PPE for local health providers.local

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You tonight on tonight on southern oregon strong -- a special report.

Local medical professionals are taking their disaster training experience to new levels.

We'll explain what they say they were prepared for -- and what they are still learning.

Local engineers, creators, doctors and more are all working together to address the need for personal protective equipment in area hospitals.

We'll show you what they're doing and how it got started.

The oregon shakespeare festival has been through the great depression, wars, and wildfires.

It isn't letting the coronavirus pandemic ruin the 2020 season.

We'll tell you what they have planned.

Good evening and thank you for joining us tonight, i'm alicia rubin.

And i'm brian morton.

Over the next half hour during this special report we'll be digging into how the southern oregon community has stepped up during the covid 19 pandemic.

We'll be talking about everything from how hospitals prepared and adapted, to how schools went completely virtual, and so much more.

Brad, can you share?

How did this come about?

How did you get this idea and then make it a reality?

Yeah.

I, uh, sent an email to one of my friends who's a nurse at the hospital and just mentioned that i'd heard about people making ventilator parts.

Do they need help in any manner?

And within a couple hours after that, on a sunday, i got an email back from brian murphy, who was the supply chain director for all of us.

And we started talking right away.

Um, he said, yes, please help us.

Kind of a mass, the troops.

And so within 24 hours, we had about 35 people on the call getting the information about what's the problem.

And then we organized and we started delivering products to the hospital literally the next day.

Wow.

So brad, can you walk me through that process?

How long does it take to go from design prototype to product.

Yeah.

That process.

It's an iterative process.

So it depends for each product, depending on how complicated it is, how mission critical it is, how important it is to work perfectly for the, uh, the, either the patients or the doctors safety.

Um.

In some of these, there's already designs out there that are pretty close and at work for other areas, but might not have been perfect for ours.

And so we just took that design and then made some minor tweaks.

And those are one that we pushed across the finish line within, you know, we at least had the first prototypes done within 24 hours.

And then, uh, and then once we've made that, then we have the doctors say, well, we like this, we don't like that.

And then that process with.

Uh, we've got, you know, derek from, uh, st mary's.

He's able to do some designs and just come up with great ideas right away.

Another guy named mathias, he can take those designs and turn them into solid works.

And then people at talent maker city and really all over the community, take those designs in three d printed.

And then we get it to the doctor's hands.

And people like earl take a look at it and be like, well, this is great, but if you could change this, that'd be great.

And then we start over.

But we already are.

Starting from a place much further than we started, and so it happens very quickly.

I mean, we're not even a route a month into this, i think by now, and we've made some pretty ridiculous progress so far.

Yeah.

Dr seeger, i'm interested to know, are these three d printed ppe equipment pieces as effective as the traditional ones.

Yeah.

I think, i mean, i think it depends on what we're talking about.

There's a lot of different products we're talking about.

I think, you know, the, the sort of.

Best product we can discuss is the face shields.

Uh, i think they're as effective as anything else out there on the market.

Um, you know, when we start talking about other items, it's, you know, you have to go through rigorous testing processes to sort of prove that.

Um, the face shields though, uh, are, are sort of amazing and it really a benefit for a santee across the entire sunday system.

Is this something that you could see hanging around?

Something that we continue to use even after copa 19.

Right now, we're really trying to just get through this pandemic situation and address the issues at hand.

But i think that is really been a, a issue in the back of my mind as well as other administrators in the sunday's mind is, wow, this is really amazing how we can have these relationships with businesses in the community.

Uh, and also just talented people in the community.

How do we continue this, uh, further on?

I mean, i think right now that's a little bit, uh, putting the cart before the courts.

We're really just trying to make sure we're protecting all of our employees right now.