COVID‐19 REPORT
New Jersey R & D Consortium Creates Mobile Medical Care Units to Address COVID‐19
Rather than moving patients out , these shipping-container-made units can meet the needs of hospitals and patients on-site .
Compiled by John Joseph Parker Contributing Editor
In response to the extreme challenges to clinical capacity posed by the COVID‐19 pandemic , three New Jersey institutions — New Jersey Institute of Technology ( NJIT ), University Hospital in Newark and The Tuchman Foundation — are collaborating in a unique partnership on the development of modular , mobile medical care facilities to be deployed to areas of surging disease outbreaks and other disasters , as well as to regions that lack healthcare infrastructure .
The modules , constructed in Woodbridge , New Jersey , are fabricated from 40-foot-long repurposed shipping containers . They have been tested for their effectiveness as triage centers in a series of staged patient-care simulations conducted by medical personnel at University Hospital .
The units include customizable internal environments that can be configured for various medical applications , including clinical pointof-care services and the testing and treatment of communicable and non-communicable diseases . They are easily transportable for rapid deployment and can be staged horizontally to create larger clinical field operations sites with effective patient separation and management .
As shipping containers , the modules can be deployed rapidly and re-deployed regionally , nationally and internationally within existing commercial intermodal networks .
“ All of these units are standard and can be moved to a particular area when there is an urgent need ,” says Martin Tuchman , CEO of the Tuchman Group and chairman of The Tuchman Foundation . “ They can be sent to any place in the United States , Canada and Mexico in a matter of days . In areas where the hospital system is overwhelmed , rather than shipping patients out of the affected area , we can ship containers into the area to meet the needs of the patient population .”
NJIT provides architectural design , management and technological know-how . Julio Garcia Figueroa , an architect and university lecturer in the NJIT Hillier College of Architecture and
Design , is the principal designer . Officials at NJIT ’ s Martin Tuchman School of Management are overseeing project management .
University Hospital , the state ’ s only public hospital and Northern New Jersey ’ s only Level-1 trauma center , is the consortium ’ s medical partner . The hospital is responsible , among other aspects , for input and feedback on the units ’ internal configurations , clinical use and regulatory requirements . The clinical team running the simulations — physicians , nurses , technicians and infrastructure support personnel — will assess the efficacy and efficiency of workflows in the modules in order to continuously refine them .
The Kingston New Jersey-based Tuchman Foundation , established by Tuchman Group CEO Martin Tuchman , supplies his company ’ s deep experience in shipping and logistics . The foundation , a nonprofit corporation that supports research on healthcare , including diseases and cures , provided initial funding to develop the prototype .
The prototype was constructed by Woodbridge , New Jersey-based Integrated Industries Corp ., a company that provides intermodal services including container and chassis modification , fabrication and storage services . The two demonstration units at University Hospital were staged one in front of the other with a central corridor connecting them , and include a registration / triage area , a patient waiting room and two testing and examination rooms .
The group ’ s phase-1 prototype will focus on simple healthcare provisioning , including initial COVID‐19 point-of-care examination and testing . A potential phase-2 model would address increased healthcare complexity with an airborne infection isolation room required to treat and manage critical patients .
Garcia Figueroa designed the initial units to create a workflow around patients who had potentially been exposed but displayed no symptoms , by creating enough space throughout them to safely admit , test and examine patients .
The prototype ’ s designers worked closely with Tomas Gregorio , chief innovation and technology officer at University Hospital , as well as with a group of emergency physicians , nurses and hospital operations experts . The team members contributed their experience in managing COVID‐19 patients at the hospital and in additional tented structures set up on the facility ’ s grounds to manage patient overflow during the height of the pandemic surge in the New York-New Jersey region .
“ All of these units are standard and can be moved to a particular area when there is an urgent need ,” says Martin Tuchman , CEO of the Tuchman Group and chairman of The Tuchman Foundation .
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